This woman's work

In vibrant drawings accompanied by bursts of evocative prose, French comics artist Delporte illustrates the memories, dreams, and journeys that led to her current understanding of being a woman. She opens the book with her father's casually derisive definition of ""woman's work"" any job shoddily done making all that follows a defiant response. Delporte goes to Finland to research artist and writer Tove Jansson, and finds Jansson's fictional Moomins, little white trolls, everywhere. Seeing the new Star Wars movie that stars a girl-hero ends a fallow creative period: ""I think of the girls growing up today. Will anything be different for them?"" She recalls sexual trauma, a personal burden that's also ""the story of all women."" Throughout, Delporte pays tribute to artists like photographer Rinko Kawauchi and filmmaker Chantal Akerman, reproducing their work in her own style, but faithfully, and sometimes incorporates painted or scotch-taped collage elements to her illustrations. With meandering but fast-moving text and colored-pencil strokes that seem to move drawings right on the page, reading this is akin to watching an animated art film.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

Womanhood is an education in grace under pressure in this melancholy meditation on art, femininity, and longing. Delporte has lived a life scarred by sexual assault, degradation, and diminishment on the basis of her gender-but she also celebrates moments touched by bliss. This contradictory reality, rendered here in vibrant, feathery pencils and inks, will be familiar to many women readers. Delporte wants a child but fears the loss of autonomy that motherhood (especially as opposed to fatherhood) brings. She yearns for love, but is sent into anxious spirals by its arrival. She tries to embrace her artistic passions fully and freely, but struggles when putting pen to paper loses its joy. How, she wonders, can one live proudly as a woman when one is restrained and constrained by societal expectations and inherited anxieties? Delporte's confident linework is at once soft-beachy blues, rumpled fabric-and almost cruelly stark. By the final page, Delporte has shared no easy answers. But the cumulative effect of her work lands soft as a child's whimper and as strong as a heroine's laugh. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.