Darkroom A memoir in black and white

Perry County, Alabama, was a hotbed of segregationist strength into the early 1960s. Weaver's family settled there upon arrival from Argentina, their physical features a confusion to their new home. Not quite in first grade at the time of the move, Weaver spent her early school years unaware of the complexity bred by racism as well as the enormity of change brought by the civil rights movement. Her father, however, a well-educated teacher with a passion for photography, took his camera to the street and captured scenes from protest marches. Weaver joined him in his darkroom and watched extraordinary images as well as comfortable reflections of her own family's life appear. The graphic-novel format Weaver chose for this memoir is fitting and absorbing, with soft pencil images that show how her perceptions of race changed during her girlhood and provide visual evidence of the violence that her father was not permitted to record. This belongs wherever there are readers of Ho Che Anderson, Melba Beals, and other witness-researchers of this galvanizing period in American history.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2010 Booklist

The deep South of the early 1960s was a world with a deep division between black and white, a time explored in this debut autobiographical graphic novel. When the Quinteros, immigrants from Argentina of mixed Indian and Spanish extraction, settle in Marion, Ala., they fit on neither side of that divide. Lila is at first anxious to blend in, refusing to speak Spanish in public or reveal that her family's breakfasts don't consist of grits and bacon. The turning point for both Lila and American society comes in 1965, as the civil rights movement inspires African-Americans to demand their voting rights. A brutal, bloody crackdown on an assembly in the Marion town square ensues, resulting in the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose death spurs the march from Selma to Montgomery. As a witness to injustices and cruelty, and influenced by her pastor father, Lila becomes more reconciled to her differences and hostile to overt and systemic racism in Marion. In beautiful gray-shaded drawings, Weaver depicts the reality of the segregated and newly integrated South and her struggle to position herself as an ally to her black classmates, only to find that it's a path fraught with pitfalls from both sides of the divide. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Transplanted at age five from Buenos Aires to Alabama, Weaver encountered the racially charged culture of the early 1960s as a Latina who is neither black nor white. Her moving, personal memoir tells of complicated feelings about understanding her Latina heritage, relating to Alabama's black and white citizenry, studying "official" Alabama history (which totally whitewashed "plantation life"), and race relations in her native Argentina. Growing up, she observes the inequalities of the Jim Crow South and witnesses key moments in the civil rights movement. She struggles to ally herself with her black classmates, but perils emerge from both sides of the divide. No neat closure develops from the darkroom of her experiences, since in Argentina and, of course, still in America, racial inequality persists. VERDICT Weaver's moving testimony provides a rarely heard voice from the turbulent past of U.S. race relations, surely one that many can relate to, about growing up feeling "different" while observing from the sidelines. Featuring graceful and realistic black-and-gray art, this is recommended for students of social inequalities, teen and adult, and will be especially valuable for classrooms. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A debut graphic memoir provides a unique child's perspective on racial strife in 1960s Alabama. Weaver came to America from Argentina in 1961 at the age of 5 and found herself considered an outsider on both sides of the racial divide. Even within her family, there were subtle distinctions, with a mother whose European ancestry made her unmistakably white, a father considerably darker and an older sister who came much closer to an American ideal of beauty (though her voluptuous lips were considered suspect). The memoir is most compelling when it reflects this child's perspective, in a town "neatly divided between black and white. Until we arrived. We introduced a sliver of gray into the demographic pie." The illustrations are impressive throughout, as the author plainly learned much from a father who had a passion for photography and a mother who was a visual artist. Yet there are stretches where this narrative of violence and turbulence could have been written by another, more conventional observer, where the author disappears from her account of many incidents that she was too young to witness, let alone understand. At such points it reads more like a civil-rights primer (often with powerful imagery) than the account from an immigrant neither black nor white, "in America but not of America." In the afterword, Weaver explains that this began as an undergraduate project by an adult student, one who is plainly an accomplished artist but who is still learning how to frame and sustain a cohesive narrative. A powerful story of a tumultuous era by an author more adept at visual art than textual storytelling.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.