Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapitrans. Mattias Ripa and Blake FerrisPantheon, 2003

Persepolis is a smart and poignant memoir of an Iranian girlhood, of life in Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s a graphic novel whose balance of words and images struck me as just right (which is to say: it’s pretty text-heavy); the art is bold and black-and-white and totally satisfying. This is a family history, a personal history, a way of remembering a time and a place: teenage rebellion and political dissidence in a political climate of fear, intimidation, brutality. I started reading on my morning commute and finished after dinner, and now I’m eager to check Persepolis 2 out of the library as well.