The property

TV producer Mica Segal accompanies her grandmother, Regina, on the old lady's first return to Warsaw since she fled, pregnant by a gentile with Mica's late father, to Palestine in 1939. On the plane, the son of a friend of Regina's ebulliently accosts the women and thereafter seems to show up wherever they go, even separately. Mica shakes him by dodging into a cafe, where she meets a charming Pole who leads Jewish history tours. Not by chance, Regina comes on her own to the same cafe to meet an old man who lives in the building yes, Mica's grandfather. While the purpose of the trip is to assert Regina's title to a building her parents had owned, what develops is an intrafamilial tiff, an ultimately fulfilling reunion, and the possible start of a romance. Modan's dialogue is smart and nuanced to match a drawing style awfully reminiscent of Herge's Tintin and up to the most complimentary comparison with it. Nicely varied panel size and earth-tone coloration further distinguish this gratifying work of comics realism.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

Modan (Exit Wounds) has proven to be one of the most accessible of graphic novelists, with a cinematic presentation and the ability to capture the complexity of larger human experience within smaller family dramas. Her latest work takes readers on a trip to Warsaw with Mica and her grandmother, Regina, both from Israel. Their purpose in Poland is to check on some long lost property that Regina's father owned prior to the Holocaust; she fled during the war, thus becoming the only family member to survive. The understanding that families were fractured and lives rerouted after WWII is nothing new, but the particulars provide the story here-family secrets and the measure of shame, historical and current attitudes between Poles and Jews, the changing views of cross-culture collusion when a hint of romance is involved, and the ways in which we don't so much reinvent ourselves as repurpose. The pursuit of old family documents is concurrent with the unearthing of family secrets, but Modan doesn't dole out the revelations with alarm or melodrama, but rather with a casual good nature toward her subjects, backed up with art somewhat reminiscent of Tintin but revealing the deepest memories of guilt and loss with merely the twitch of a line. A beautiful, fully realized story that's as much "novel" as "graphic". (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.