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La Perdida
by Jessica Abel
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780375423659 |
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
From the Harvey and Lulu award–winning creator of Artbabe comes this riveting story of a young woman's misadventures in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to "find herself." She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good—humored about Carla's reappearance on his doorstep — until he realizes that Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo’s house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving.
When Harry and Carla's relationship of mutual tolerance reaches its inevitable end, she rejects his world of Anglo expats for her own set of friends: pretty-boy Oscar, who sells pot and dreams of being a DJ, and charismatic Memo, a left-wing, pseudo–intellectual ladies' man. Determined to experience the real Mexico, Carla turns a blind eye to her new friends' inconsistencies. But then she catches the eye of a drug don, el Gordo, and from that moment on her life gets a lot more complicated, and she is forced to confront the irreparable consequences of her willful innocence.
Jessica Abel's evocative black–and–white drawings and creative mix of English and Spanish bring Mexico City's past and present to life, unfurling Carla's dark history against the legacies of Burroughs and Kahlo. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La Perdida — at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal — is a story about finding oneself by getting lost.
Review:
"Carla Olivares, a young Mexican-American woman, goes to Mexico City to try to get in touch with her Mexican side. She's got her own, distorted ideas about what that means, and her annoyance with an old boyfriend who's leading his idea of the romantic expatriate life (by hanging out exclusively with other expats) makes her even more nervous about coming off like an outsider. She starts hanging out with a bunch of local lowlifes and blowhards who feed her guilt about being a privileged 'conquistadora.' They talk big (about stardom and revolution), but barely scrape by on petty crime — which eventually becomes not so petty, and sucks Carla into a vortex of fear and violence. Abel's published several books of her shorter comics stories, but for her first long-form graphic novel she's developed a new, impressively assured style, built around bold, rough brushstrokes. She's got a telegraphic command of body language — her characters' faces are simplified to the point where their eyes are usually just dots — and the backgrounds nicely evoke the architecture and heat of Mexico City. What really makes the story compelling, though, is Abel's sensitivity to character and dialogue — Carla is the narrator, but she's hardly a heroine, and the way crucial meanings are lost in translation ratchets up the dramatic tension." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Jessica Abel?s La Perdida is rich, engrossing, and memorable — a true graphic novel." Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics
Review:
"Put down your dog-eared Love and Rockets and read this. Fans of Los Bros will recognize a kindred spirit, but Abel is every inch her own artist. Her tale of Carla?s catastrophic folly is fierce and unforgettable." Susan Choi, author of American Woman and The Foreign Student
Review:
"Jessica Abel is brilliant. She?s created amazing work for years, and La Perdida is her classic. It?s funny, politically astute, and heartbreaking. It?s graphic novel poetry." Sherman Alexie, author of The Toughest Indian in the World
Synopsis:
In this richly emotional, high-velocity tale, a young woman journeys to Mexico City in search of her true identity, only to discover a self she can hardly recognize. This is first full-length graphic novel from Jessica Abel, an acclaimed young comics artist.
About the Author
Jessica Abel is the author of Soundtrack and Mirror, Window, two collections that gather stories and drawings from her comic book Artbabe, which she published between 1992 and 1999. She also collaborated with Ira Glass on Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a nonfiction comic about how the public radio program This American Life is made. Abel won both the Harvey and Lulu awards for Best New Talent in 1997; La Perdida won the 2002 Harvey Award for Best New Series. Abel?s young adult novel, Carmina, is forthcoming in 2007, and she is currently collaborating on another graphic novel, Life Sucks, and a textbook about making comics.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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Kirsten, August 18, 2006 (view all comments by Kirsten)
This fantastic graphic novel follows the adventures of a young woman named Carla who embarks on a somewhat misguided journey to Mexico in search of her roots. While she is half Mexican, Carla quickly discovers that her class and cultural background make it impossible for her to ever truly be accepted and fit in with her Mexican friends. Despite this, Carla rejects her ex-pat friends and falls in with Memo, a communist pseudo-intellectual, and his attractive but dim friend Oscar.
Carla's innocence and longing to belong sometimes make you cringe as you're reading. Memo is a jerk and cuts down Carla at every turn, but she puts up with it because of what I can only describe as her liberal white guilt. She's continually caught between cultures -- she rejects her white friends, but simply can't be accepted by her Mexican friends, or at least not by Memo and his fellow "revolutionaries." As it turns out, her wish to belong ends up causing her to overlook more than just Memo's insults, and she finds herself in very real danger.
The events in this book, particularly in the second half, could have failed miserably in the hands of a lesser writer, but Abel does an excellent job of setting things up so that they feel believable. She also manages to keep Carla very real without making her unsympathetic. The artwork is dense and well-suited to the subject, and this is a very rewarding book.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780375423659
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Pantheon Books
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Graphic Novels - General
- Publication Date:
- March 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 275
- Dimensions:
- 8.74x6.90x1.07 in. 1.35 lbs.
