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Dec 22, 2011

Paul rated it:

THIS JUST IN : P BRYANT FAILS HIP GRAPHIC NOVEL TEST

Fun Home, a cripplingly hip graphic novel, is....

Yes?

It's....

YES??

Well, let's see, it's, you know, all right, good, yes, nods head, hummphs into beard, pulls earlobe, raises eyebrows, waves hands in a vague direction, shifts about in seat. You know. Don't get me wrong. It was good. Yes. Cool, clever, really hip, I mean, really, as far as I can tell, my hipometer needs a new batte More...

10 comments like (20 people liked it)

Sep 01, 2011

oriana rated it:

I forgot to mention, for the record, that this was book #4 for Jugs & Capes, my amazing all-girl graphic-novel book club. We discussed it this evening over truffle-salted popcorn and green tea gelato. Isn't that grand?

You can also read this review (slightly tweaked) on CCLaP.

***

I've been wanting to read this book for years. Isn't it crazy that I had to start an entire graphic novel book club to somehow give myself permission to read it?

Perhaps. Bu More...

10 comments like (19 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2007

Emily rated it:

Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre, I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes--almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from the office to my home in Connecticut, where I had plans to spend the weekend.

One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my mom pulled in her mini-van, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I'm a slow reader More...

0 comments like (33 people liked it)

Nov 21, 2011

KFed rated it:

Alison Bechdel’s comic-form autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic begins and ends with strong textual and visual images of her father. The book’s first full drawing on the title page of chapter one is, in fact, a recreation of an old photograph of the enigmatic man. It sums up all that is impossible to capture about the man’s sexual and emotional being in one frame. As well, it sums up everything that makes this work artistically and thematically remarkable, an important contribution to li More...

5 comments like (8 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2008

Sara rated it:

I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and sedu More...

2 comments like (17 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Jordan rated it:

An exceptionally well-written piece of work that will hopefully open some doors to people unwilling to take comic art seriously.
That said, I can't help but compare it to the benchmarks of graphic novel memoirs - "Blankets," "Maus," and "Persepolis" - and it falls short. It just didn't draw me in the way I should have been. She relies too heavily on captions and telling us what happened, rather than letting her characters speak to each other and show us. She More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lisa rated it:

Brilliant! (That word sums it up just fine and could have been a fine entire review.)

I’ve never been a huge comics fan. I liked Peanuts from a young age and Doonesbury and I think The Far Side is absolutely perfect, but I never read comic books when I was young. As an adult I’ve found many graphic/comic book books that I’ve enjoyed, most of them memoirs and this is another one, a unique one.

I am in awe of those who can take their pain & grief & the unfinished business in More...

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

May 27, 2008

Suzi rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 13, 2011

Jimmy rated it:

The 7 chapters in this graphic memoir feel less like she's telling you a story from beginning to end... and more like she's telling you the same story 7 times. But each time, she reveals a little bit more, either contextual, historical, or personal analysis. It's more of a graphic-personal-essay than a graphic-memoir, in that she is trying to work something out, trying to make some meaning out of her past by looking at it from several different angles. The point is not to tell a good story, t More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Nov 24, 2008

Dusty rated it:

I had some mixed reactions to the this book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2008

Trin rated it:

Really fantastic graphic novel about Bechdel dealing with her father’s (possible) suicide, learning that he spent most of his life in the closet, and discovering and embracing her own sexuality. There’s a lot that’s great about this book, but I think my favorite thing was the way Bechdel used literature—her father was an English teacher and a big reader—to illustrate aspects of her story. She draws parallels between works such as Ulysses, The Remembrance of Things Past, and The Great Gatsby More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2012

Monica! rated it:

I'm not entirely sure how to review this book, which tells the story of the author's childhood, her relationship with her (closeted gay and eventually suicidal) father, and her own sexuality. It really gives the impression you're reading a diary, interspersed as it is with realistic photo illustrations, letters, and journal entries, and as a result... how do you review someone's diary?

But it's brilliant for sure, filled with uncomfortable silences and family secrets and Ulysses and More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 05, 2010

Meg rated it:

Reading Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic put me in the same irritated and impatient mood experienced when reading Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon in high school: both books feel like major wank-offs to the writers' cumulative reading endeavors. To put it in less crude terms, both books overflow with self-conscious references to classic literature (both use The Odyssey in a major way). However, this is not a review of The Song of Solomon, so I suppose I will set aside that grudge for now.
More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2009

Emilia rated it:

You know, I thought this book couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered it. But it really really is. It is exquisitely paced and laid out and drawn and balances Bechdel's story with her father's very well. And yes, it is maybe a little snobbily literary (Camus, Proust, Anais Nin, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Wilde off the top of my head) but it is essential to the nature of the characters.

So two of the basic themes are important ones. First: family and memory. She makes More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2011

Seth rated it:

For some reason, and it may be a reaction based upon my own opposing predilection, attempts at overachievement bother me. When a person tries to act beyond the envelope of their abilities, I become put off. At least, I do when I notice. When an artist tries to create something amazing and succeeds without hiccough, I am wholly unperturbed—this due the nature of success. A clean success betrays no hint that the accomplishment was any kind of a stretch, no evidence that the achievement More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 21, 2007

Earline rated it:

just insert "Fun Home" in place of "House of Leaves" in Mickey's review:

This book looks at you with this smug fucking smile on it's face, daring you to say that you don't like it, knowing that masses of people are going to go along with it because they don't want to look stupid. That's what this is. It's the fucking Radiohead of books. Well, House of Leaves, I am not stupid and I'm calling your bullshit. Fuck you

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Amanda rated it:

Meh. It was very self-indulgent (although i suppose most memoirs are)...also it was unexpectedly heavy on the literary references, and i didn't get a lot of them. But the illustrations weren't bad.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 25, 2010

David rated it:

Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ is a difficult read for many reasons. The subject matter is immediately controversial: a gay woman trying to come to terms with the death of her father having recently discovered that he had hidden his own homosexuality his whole life.
Bechdel often uses the comparison of Icarus and Daedalus to illustrate the complexities and near madness of a man obsessed with perfection and full of idiosyncratic compulsions; honing his invention and intelligence while at the sa More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2008

Jane rated it:

I enjoyed this a lot. The stuff about Proust, Joyce, Collette, etc etc triangulates the narration with the remembered events (and the reader) the same way that cultural artifacts triangulate the relationships in the family, and also revenge the author upon the disliked habits of literary reading she remembers, not only from her charming but narcissistic parents but from her English classes at Oberlin. However, they take up a lot of room, and honestly for some of it I'd have rather heard about so More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Oct 31, 2008

Berenice rated it:

Fun home is a book by Alison Bechdel. This book is actually a graphic memoir of Alison’s life. This book involved her going through a lot of phases from when she was a child all the way into her college years. One of those is when she dresses like a boy. Then as she grows up and goes to college she admits that she is lesbian. Her father’s death was a constant reminder of who she was and how that affected her in her life even before he died and after her father was no longer with her. Even thoug More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 17, 2008

Aerin rated it:

I very rarely read "graphic novels" (that term still screams "euphemism for comic book!" to me, so I feel obliged to put it in quotes). I think I've only ever read this one and Persepolis, and although I enjoyed both of them immensely, I'd still feel a little weird seeking other ones out. There's something that feels so deviant, so guilty-pleasureish about reading a book full of pictures. Like it's cheating. Like it's not a real book.

Nonetheless, Fun Home wa More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 13, 2008

Lizzie rated it:

Chris bought this last year and when we were moving he put it in the to-Strand pile, from which I rescued it. Amy loves this book! I said. You can't sell books Amy loves til I read them!

It was an interesting way to read it, doing the detective work the whole time of why Amy loves this book and Chris disliked this book. I thought it was very nice. In the memoir comic genre, it's a smart one. I liked the thoughtful threads of symbolism and memory. Those are good ingredients in sto More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Erik rated it:

Bechdel’s underground hit Dykes to Watch Out For has always been floating somewhere on my peripheral vision when it comes to comics – much like gay comic strip artist Howard Cruise’s Wendel strip. So it was with great surprise and relish that I picked up this 2007 Eisner-winning graphic novel of hers. Not unlike Cruise’s quasi-autobiographical literary graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, Bechdel takes Fun Home far beyond her usual comic strip format by composing a multi-layered memoir that is best More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 01, 2007

Katherine rated it:

I liked the New York Times' blurb best: "This is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."

I'm glad that graphic novels are now generally accepted as a legitimate storytelling medium, because we get works like this from cartoonists who used to relegate themselves to a block of panels once a week.

This is Bechdel's story of growing up with her father's secrets and his (probable) suicid More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 24, 2008

Ritz marked it as to-read

En castellano se llama Fun home. Una familia tragicómica, de Alison Bechdel. Publica Mondadori.

En 2006, la prestigiosa editorial neoyorquina Houghton Mifflin publicó Fun Home. Una familia tragicómica, el exitosos relato de maduración de Alison Bechdel, que ha sido calificado de "proeza de retrato familiar" y de "raro y original ejemplo de por qué las novelas gráficas han dado que hablar en la literatura americana".
El padre de Alison, la protagonista (y autora d More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 14, 2009

unnarrator rated it:

How did I not rate this earlier!? Grim self-conscious brilliance, of course. Something over which to pore in every frame (maybe, at moments, too much?). Gluey and intrinsic references to Proust, James, Fitzgerald. Funnier than Six Feet Under, plottier than The L Word, most anguished when it's simple and image-based. I've been crushed out on Bechdel since 1992 and this book didn't help. Read it immediately.

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 19, 2007

Tom rated it:

Alison Bechdel deserves an award for this book. Her writing is haunting and her line work is exquisite. From the silvery coating on the jacket to the masterful story on its pages, this is a work to be treasured -- one of the great works of current graphic literature and one of the most extraordinary memoirs I have ever encountered.

The book is about Allison's father. She explores his anger, his artistic past, his neuroses, and the hatred with which he interacts with her and her mothe More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 15, 2008

Shawntain rated it:

I would have given this graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel's secretly gay dad, who happened to be a funeral home director, seven stars if I could have! It is probably the best I've ever read, so sensitively drawn, funny, literary, and with a lovely story structure. Just amazing all around.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 02, 2008

melbourne rated it:

Allison Bechdel's graphic novel is a deeply affecting memoir about coming to terms with familial truths as well as those that can influence an individual's sense of self. Fun Home succeeds in demonstrating all the drama, strangeness and even ambivalence that accompanies growing up in a dysfunctional, or perhaps eccentric household. While Bechdel succeeds at avoiding simplicity and sensationalism, at times it is difficult to feel anything for any of the characters. In fact, one can easily begin t More...

0 comments like

Apr 02, 2008

simon rated it:

jessi told me about this book and it was every bit as perfect as i thought it might be. i've loved just about everything alison bedchel has ever done, i've been a Dykes to Watch Out For fan since i was a babydyke and i re-read them as often as i can get my hands on them.

this book is beautiful and real and with absolutely no apologies, but is complex and subtle. i also love the comic genre and should read a lot more of it, admittedly. i teared at times - the combination of line d More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

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