Embroideries

Satrapi follows her acclaimed youth memoirs Persepolis0 (2003) and Persepolis 20 BKL Ag 04 with some tales her grandmother, mother, aunts, and their bosom friends told her about sex and men--stories that are frank, funny, occasionally sad, and utterly credible. Thrice-married Grandma recalls the friend who took counsel on how to convince her husband she was still a virgin--with hilarious, wince-inducing results. Another woman confides that, despite her children (all daughters), "I've never seen or touched anything"--male, that is. Arranged marriages, a potion to bind a lover, cosmetic surgery, "embroidery"--by which is meant another means of "restoring" virginity--and more are revealed, assessed, and resolved, all within the context of a women-only tea-bibbing circle in which young Marji is cook (not brewer, she explains), decanter, and enthralled listener. In line with the book's aura of abandoned constraints, Satrapi dispenses with panel frames; she also elides most background detail; and those choices make the book less graphic-novelish than cartoonish a la, say, Jules Feiffer. The sparkling verbal content, however, triumphs. --Ray Olson Copyright 2005 Booklist

This slight follow-up to Satrapi's acclaimed Persepolis books explores the lives of Iranian women young and old. The book begins with Satrapi arriving for afternoon tea at her grandmother's house. There, her mother, aunt and their group of friends tell stories about their lives as women, and, more specifically, the men they've lived with and through. One woman tells a story about advising a friend on how to fake her virginity, a scheme that goes comically wrong. Another tells of escaping her life as a teenage bride of an army general. Satrapi's mother tells an anecdote of the author as a child; still others spin yarns of their sometimes glamorous, sometimes difficult, lives in Iran. The tales themselves are entertaining, though the folksiness and common themes of regret and elation feel familiar. Satrapi's artwork does nothing to elevate her source material; her straightforward b&w drawings simply illustrate the stories, rather than elucidating or adding meaning to them. Characters are hard to distinguish from each other, and Satrapi's depictions of gestures and expressions are severely limited, hampering any attempt at emotional resonance. This work, while charming at times, feels like an afterthought compared to Satrapi's more distinguished work on Persepolis and its sequel. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Satrapi departs from Persepolis to depict a group of women sitting around talking about men. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Let's talk about sex . . . and the disappointments of men. In her previous pair of graphic novels (Persepolis, 2003 and 2004, whose acclaim helped to heighten the recent push to further legitimize an always somewhat maligned field), the young author told the autobiographical story of her unsuccessful life in Europe before being forced to return to her native Iran, and the culture clash that ensued. This time, Satrapi keeps to her earlier themes of autobiography, Iranian womanhood and its conflicts within a traditional society being encroached on by Western ideas, while providing a somewhat lighter framework. Structured more as a casual conversation, a coffee klatch among the girls, Satrapi eavesdrops on her grandmother and relatives and friends as they talk about being women and, more specifically, about men. It's refreshingly surprising from the get-go, as Satrapi introduces her grandmother as an elegantly made-up grande dame, an old woman who just happens to be a lifelong opium addict and who encourages Satrapi to close her eyes more--all in order to have a drugged look that would be seductive for men. Placed in charge of the all-important samovar, Satrapi listens as the women sip their tea and talk, because as her grandmother says, "to speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart." In these anecdotes, men are uniformly imbecilic, or simply clueless, as witnessed by the story of the non-virginal woman who took the grandmother's advice and, on her honeymoon night, placed a razor blade between her thighs so that her husband would think he'd broken her hymen. Things didn't go well. More laughs are to be had, though often bittersweet, in the other tales in which women find themselves stuck between a patriarchal tradition and the desire for love and freedom, though nothing is made out to be quite so simple as that. Lighter in subject matter than her previous work, Satrapi keeps things semicomical, even when relating matters of severe heartbreak, and her dashed-off drawings (with their slightly childlike expressions) help matters along. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.