THE BOOK OF SARAH
by Sarah Lightman
The Pennsylvania University Press, 237 pages
reviewed by Emily Steinberg
Sarah Lightman’s poignant, engrossing and poetic graphic memoir, The Book of Sarah , leads the reader on an epic odyssey, moving back and forth in time, from the author’s early twenties as an uncertain, dependent, and depressed young artist to a confident forty-five-year-old woman who is finally the architect of her own life.
Raised in England in a traditional Jewish family, Lightman perfectly plays the role of the sheltered, good daughter, but is squelched, suffocated and empty inside. She became more Orthodox as a way to feel part of something larger. She wrote to me in an email, “I had great feelings of inadequacy and no idea about how to navigate life. I think religion can tell you how to live and it is easier than that long, painful journey of working out who you are and making up your own mind about things.” A late bloomer, she eventually discovered she no longer needed the architecture of orthodoxy and began building a “scaffolding of self” with permission to live her own life.
The heart of Lightman’s book is her art, and the black and white graphite drawings of architecture and often overlooked everyday objects are particularly forceful and beautiful. Intensely drawn, with energetic, almost obsessive marks and stark contrast of dark and light, we view sides of buildings with fire escapes, exteriors of family homes and dining-room table and chairs, interiors and exteriors of her boarding school outside London, her books, her therapist’s office, chairs and shoes.
Lightman writes and draws about being a young artist, anxiously uncertain of her abilities.
“I worked through a salad as I waited for a rejection from a gallery.”
She writes beautifully of the overlapping of life events , or as she puts it, “The maths of life. A birth. A death. A Marriage. A death. Someone’s happiness. Someone else’s tears.” She seeks love and relationship, but doesn’t know herself and so can’t know another.
“I had a toothbrush next to mine, so did that mean I was your girlfriend?”
Life evolves. She finds Charlie and has a Traditional Jewish Wedding. Then, her Grandfather is in Hospital and “we visit him everyday and read him psalms.” She muses about motherhood at thirty-six, describing her son Harry’s arrival and what was like to be a new mom.
Life isn’t perfect for Lightman, but she finds a place of contentment that is enough. While searching for a scaffolding to build her life on, we see it was there all along in her art and in The Book of Sarah, Lightman leads us to a place that is both gorgeous and profound.
“Oh my little Love.”
Sarah Lightman is an artist who writes, draws and paints about her life experiences. She is co-founder of “Laydeez do Comics,” an international forum for women comics artists and editor of the incredible Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, (2014), a collection of the work of eighteen international Jewish female auto-bio comics artists. She earned a PhD from The University of Glasgow in the field of Women’s Autobiographical Comics.
.
◊◊
Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].
Alexandra Kanovsky is an avid reader and editor and a recent graduate of Kenyon College, where she majored in English and completed her thesis on girlhood in graphic novels. She has interned and worked for a variety of literary locales including Restless Books, Lime Books, and Impress Books. She also served as the Editor-in-Chief of HIKA Literary Magazine, Kenyon’s oldest literary publication. Alexandra can be reached at 
CARTOON DIALECTICS
Julia Alekseyeva is a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute at Harvard. She researches global media (including film, television, and comics) and radical leftwing activism. She is also an author-illustrator whose debut graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm, 2017) recently won the VLA Diversity Award.
THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR
Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. She is a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, and makes her home in the Northeast
IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS
MOONCOP 
Ansel Shipley is soon to be a graduate of SUNY Purchase College with a degree in literature. He is the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. 
SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION
ROLLING BLACKOUTS: DISPATCHES FROM TURKEY, SYRIA, AND IRAQ
Brian Burmeister teaches writing and communication at Iowa State University. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, 
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION
As Dana says at one point, “People don’t learn everything about the times that came before them.” We know slavery happened. But we don’t feel it. And, I suspect for many of us, we don’t like to think about it. To assist with the lessons Butler wants us to learn, Dana, who is very much her own character, functions in part as a proxy of the reader. Butler could have simply written a story set in 1800s Maryland, but by having the realities of slavery not just witnessed but lived by a protagonist from the modern era, we are forced to feel and think about that tragic era of our history as though it were happening to us.
MARCH
In telling the stories, Powell’s beautiful black and white illustrations expertly utilize white and dark space to convey affect. In the most violent, atrocious, and tragic of moments, such as the shooting of 26-year old activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper, the dark of the ink envelops the page, injecting the scene with a powerful, insidious tone. At other times, such as in the representation of President Obama’s inauguration, a true lightness takes form, and the joy of celebrating an event that almost certainly seemed impossible up until this point erupts off each page.
COSPLAYERS
A deft humorist, Shaw has a knack for timing and observation reminiscent of Daniel Clowes, although his dialogue is more naturalistic than Clowes’s heavily verbal narration. The people in Cosplayers will remind many readers of situations they have been in and people they have known, depicted empathetically yet unflinchingly in all their awkward glory.
Nathan Chazan is from Toronto, Canada. He is currently an undergraduate classics major at Cornell University. He has a long-standing interest in comics and graphic novels as a legitimate and powerful art form.
HOT DOG TASTE TEST
Matthew Horowitz is a group home worker with delusions of eloquence. He acts on whatever stage will permit him, and holds a bachelor’s degree in theater and psychology from Southern Connecticut State University. His area of study involves the creation and manipulation of the human psyche through performative action and ritual.
PEPLUM
Peplum reads as character-driven fiction, but upon closer scrutiny the work is actually quite similar in approach to Blutch’s later, essayistic graphic narrative So Long, Silver Screen. As in Silver Screen, Blutch works through his artistic obsessions by means of quotation — most of the dialogue in Peplum directly excerpts the original text of The Satyricon, spoken by different characters and in varying contexts. With this in mind, the comic’s presentation is actually quite experimental, page upon page of figures contorted in agony and lust while spewing jokes at each other, each passage less coherent the more its context is considered.
OPERATION NEMESIS
Jesse Allen lives graduated from Cuny’s Graduate Center with a masters in Arts and Liberal Studies with a focus on New York Studies. He is a life long fan of comics, graffiti, and space operas and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
PATIENCE
Amy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.
THE OVEN
AGONY
THE ETERNAUT
A GIRL ON THE SHORE
The power of A Girl on the Shore is rooted in the emotional realism of its characters. Although the story of sex and trauma is (one hopes) not a universal experience, the concerns and anxieties, the precociousness and emotional need depicted through these characters is painfully real. Asano is able to capture how young people who have trouble expressing themselves try to discuss, or talk around, their feelings. The dialogue is written in the language of melodrama, but it is not so much that this is a melodramatic story as it is a story about people who try to understand their difficult world in melodramatic terms, and the conflict results from the dissonance between melodrama and reality. We see this conflict, for example, in a climactic scene where Koume believes she has to save Keisuke, a third act crisis straight out of your favorite romantic comedy. But Keisuke doesn’t need saving, which leaves Koume alone to be confronted with her own fears and the needs she mistakenly projected onto another person’s situation.
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE
LOSE 7
THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN
Rachael Tague grew up in the Indianapolis area and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Cedarville University. She is an editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine.
LONG WALK TO VALHALLA
The “pretty things” are where Fox’s art really shines. It is their inclusion that gives more breadth to the story being told. The artwork portrays these beings as vividly as a young boy’s visions, stretching them into the absurd as well as the terrifying. Perhaps Joe’s monsters are metaphorical, perhaps not. The true monster, for Rory at least, is his father, Dwayne. Dwayne reappears toward the end of the narrative, shoes first, looming menacingly, just as he did when Rory was a child.
Brazos Price is from Austin, Texas where he served as an inaugural member of the Texas Library Association’s Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List. He has also reviewed comics for the librarian-focused website 
DOCTORS
The happiness Miss Bell feels in the afterlife never seems to be replicated in real life, and the ethics of the Charon project are called into question by some of those carrying it out. As one gets midway through the book, the central focus shifts from Miss Bell to the doctors themselves. Conflicts arise between the father-daughter duo of doctors who run the Charon program, with tensions running high and no consensus ever reached. This father-daughter pair discuss, debate, and fight. Does the Charon help or hurt people? Should it be available to everyone or just the exceptionally wealthy? Does its very use cross the line into playing God?
YOU DON’T SAY
Stephanie Trott received a B. A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. 
ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND
What I can say after reading this graphic biography is that Andre’s life was both fantastic and flawed. He was adored by millions of fans while making millions of dollars. Yet everywhere he went people stared, and as he aged every step he took was accompanied by pain. Andre’s size and the condition which contributed to it (acromegaly) condemned him, as Brown writes in his introduction, “to a death sentence.” Andre’s enormity, the very aspect of his being which helped make him famous, also ensured his health would deteriorate rapidly and at a young age.
BLACK RIVER
FIRST YEAR HEALTHY
Travis DuBose’s fiction has appeared in Apiary and Petrichor Machine, and he was the recent recipient of a Jan-Ai Scholarship Foundation award. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife.
SUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY
DISPLACEMENT
THE SCULPTOR
The Sculptor could have easily thrilled with its grand narrative scale alone—its panels are charged with the same energy as recent action movies highlighting comic greats. And David Smith could have easily slid into the heroic tradition of struggling yet gifted men, offering a focused desire to create rather than disassemble. But McCloud implodes our expectations and instead writes the veritable textbook on misdirection. The Sculptor is not about a deal with death; The Sculptor is about falling in love when the stakes are viciously high. A forecast is spelled, and then quieted: because there is a girl, and she is beautiful, and that observance is an art form unto itself.
Meg, the “object” of David’s affections, challenges his predominantly tactile relationship with the world. He cannot mold her, only model after her. He studies her face with his hands, creates busts after every one of her expressions. And Meg has many expressions: she is no smooth screen built to receive the projection of his fantasies. She ripples, she rips, and she creases.
THE DEATH OF ARCHIE: A LIFE CELEBRATED
Now, the latest Life With Archie comics have surpassed all others by dismantling the romance genre that promised a life of wedlock and nuclear family values, in favor of tragedy in the form of the untimely death of a hero. Victor Gorelick, The Death of Archie Editor-in-Chief, anticipates the obvious question on everybody’s mind, writing, in the forward to #36, “[s]o, why does Archie have to die?” Quickly, he answers, “[i]t’s not because Riverdale has changed, or that the fundamental basics of what made Archie great have been altered—what’s changed is reality.”
First, the comics are cheesy, and not in the good, campy, retro, pie-in-the-face-humor sort of way. The switch to drama has changed Archie from an impulsive guy to a virtuous, introspective one, but worse—it has the distinct feeling of being prescribed drama, with predictable lines about life’s milestones. We are being asked to take a clown seriously; well, that is just not fun.
We are also being asked to take Kevin Keller, who personifies political correctness—he is a politician who is not-so-incidentally gay—seriously. But he is not realistic. He is more of a description of what soccer moms want gay men to be than any gay man I’ve come across. He’s a Christian singer/song-writer, the kind that performs with an acoustic guitar during song circle, and someone has convinced him to go to Riverdale and pretend to be a gay man.
Second, Archie didn’t have to grow up for his character to continue developing. Since the dawn of the Life with Archie series, Archie has been steadily checking off his “normal guy” to-do list. He has blossomed into a starkly sober, completely socialized, self-aware, mildly depressed, and utterly boring adult. Yes, the every-boy has turned into the every-man and the series message has unwittingly remained a scowling “grown-ups suck!”
I do like some things about The Death of Archie. The story is quick-paced and has clever transitions. There is graphic rhyming (Archie’s pooling blood recalls a spilt chocolate soda, for example). The Betty or Veronica enigma —which one did he choose?— is consistent and riveting throughout. The paratextual notes and collectable covers drawn by various artists at the end are a treat for fans.
