Maids

Skelly (My Pretty Vampire) plays with the dark side of femininity in this quietly vicious graphic novel based on a historical murder case, which unfurls like a wicked fairy tale. In 1930s Paris, sisters Lea and Christine Papin work as maids to the Lancelins, a family too wrapped up in petty personal dramas to view the help as more than occasionally malfunctioning appliances. The narrative observes the sisters through daily chores--cooking, cleaning, tending the garden and the chicken coop--and flashes back to their troubled past, including hiding from their alcoholic mother and an unhappy stint at a convent. Christine takes an obsessively protective role toward Lea, who suffers intrusive thoughts and visions. "No one would ever know who we were before," they intone to each other. But those old wounds haven't healed, and new injuries from their callous employers push the sisters past their breaking point. Skelly's signature spindly, long-limbed figures, with sweetheart mouths and bloodied hands, look like old-fashioned fashion drawings gone just a bit wrong. Under the aggressively girly gloss, the tale writhes with sex, violence, madness, and rebellion. This subversive horror story will satisfy readers who like their crime stories served with gender and class analysis and a pretty whipped topping. (Oct.)

After being ejected from a convent, Lea Papin goes to work alongside her sister Christine as a live-in maid for the wealthy Lancelin family in Le Mans, France. Despite long hours, tedious work, and the casual cruelty or open disdain with which Madame Lancelin and her daughter Genevieve treat them, the sisters are still thrilled to be reunited and experience a sense of liberation at being free from their abusive mother, with an income all their own. As tensions within the Lancelin family escalate, the Papin sisters are increasingly mistreated. Rebellious Christine makes a game of lashing out through minor acts of subversion and encourages her sister to follow her lead, which she does with a zeal that betrays the rage and darkness behind her seemingly timid demeanor. When Madame Lancelin finally threatens to fire them both, the stage is set for the gruesome finale of this true crime story that rocked France in the early 1930s. VERDICT Skelly (The Agency) reveals the horror of the Papin sisters' crimes on the very first page of this tense gem, but her perceptive examination of the complex bond between Catherine and Lea evokes incredible sympathy for the two nonetheless.