Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship

by Janice Shapiro

When Ida is sent away for the summer to stay with the Murphys — friends of her father, but also of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald — she travels from New York to France and, unknowingly, into the artistic epicenter of 1929. There, she meets their haughty, sullen, and precocious daughter, Honoria, and wonders if she can be friends with the prettiest girl in the whole world. In the “perfect inverted world” of adults, one of constant play and leisure — and inebriation, of course — it’s the children who most acutely perceive the pervasive unhappiness bubbling beneath the surface gaiety.Achingly sad and effortlessly funny, full of the kind of youthful sincerity unclouded by pretenses of age, short story writer and cartoonist Janice Shapiro’s debut graphic novel, Honoria, is the complex story of the education of two young girls who have started moving slowly into womanhood.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, History, Graphic Novels Comics

352 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Janice Shapiro studied film at UCLA where she won first prize in The Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Competition. The short films she directed were screened widely at film festivals around the world and she was a recipient of an AFI Filmmakers Grant. She has written scripts for numerous studios and independent producers including the cult film, Dead Beat that she co-wrote with her husband, Adam Dubov.

Janices short stories have been published in The North American Review, and The Santa Monica Review. A graphic memoir of hers was included in the anthology, What Were We Thinking? published by St. Martins press. Another graphic memoir appeared in The Seattle Review. Bummer and Other Stories is her first book.

She is currently working on a novel, Bad Baseball, a second collection of short stories, a collection of food essays entitled, Eat Like Me, and a book length graphic memoir, Crushable My Life In Crushes From Ricky Nelson to Viggo Mortensen.

Janice lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and dog.
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Reviews

[Lorian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the story, the friendship coming to life. Also touching was the strangeness of childhood, when you are never told all the truth, but you have to try to decipher some of it, from looks and unsaid words between adults. A child is thrown to a strange reality, an unfamiliar setting, and they can't change it, only observe and survive it, and luckily, in this case, they are rewarded with friendship.

I also liked a lot the visual style and composition, and the rhythm of the work.

I only wished for one thing: I would have liked an informative afterword.

As many of the characters are based on real lives of historical persons, a few words of how the story used its material (the real lives and events) would have been a nice touch.

I really do appreciate it, when a writer of a historical novel discusses some of their choices. It's nice to be informed - some authors, for example, may tell that they used, say, a technical invention in the story even though it was only invented a year later, or some such. Authors often proceed to tell why they told their story the way they did, why they changed this or that fact etc. Some also discuss the sources they used for their story, which I also highly enjoy.

Here, the author, in an afterword, could have offered some facts about the Murphys and Villa America, for example, and how this book chose to change some facts. As an author of a fictional work, you can change facts, but I do like some transparency. The facts are, in this instance for example, that the real life Honoria did not have one, but two brothers, and neither of them died in 1920s, but later.

I understand that the author wanted to place this story in the 1929 - when the Murphys still had their Antibes house, and when Zelda Fitzgerald hadn't yet been diagnosed with schizofrenia, and when Hitler was not yet in power... And so on.

But if the author wanted to tell about the life in Villa America and the era in general, as seen through a visiting child, then why make Honoria lose her brother(s) years before it happened? In real life, Patrick died in 1937, and Baoth 1935, after the Murphys had returned to the US.

Why Ida, the POV character in this story, had to find a bitter and lonely Honoria at the Villa, and not all the Murphy children, as she would have, in the beginnig of the summer 1929? It is a bit odd, as summer 1929 Patrick fell ill with tuberculosis, so there would have been timely drama that year, too; a real shattering of a lifestyle.

In the story, Gerald Murphy paints his famous Wasp and pear -painting and shows it to Ida, and he really did paint that in 1929. But he didn't paint anything after it - after Patrick fell ill. That was the watershed for the family, or so it's usually told. Summer 1929 was the last golden summer for the Murphys, but not because of Baoth's death, as in this book, but because of Patrick's illness and the family's relocation to Switzerland for a time. Now, Patrick's wholly omitted, and I wonder why?

Although Ida is the POV, the real interest for the story does not come from her, but from her setting: her observations of the life in Villa America. It is a clever device, to bring in an outsider, and a child at that, who looks at things and wonders. But I have to wonder, why change so many of the facts Ida observes?

If the fictional (as I assume, without any afterword telling otherwise) Ida's story in itself would be the main focus, the family she visits that summer would not have been a real life celebrity family, but some fictional rich-y American family having a continental season. Against that, Ida's story would have been the main interest. Now Ida is the entry point to a well-known history, but what Ida observes, is altered in ways I can't really understand, without a reasoning.

The author made a lot of individual decisions as this story is not 'as it happened'-story, and I would have liked to know a bit more about those decisions and her thought process and goals.

[Kirsten Mickelwait · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been obsessed with Sara and Gerald Murphy since I was young, so I was super-excited to find this new telling of the magical community they created in France in the 1920s. While S&G and their famous friends—notably F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—get some page-time, it's their daughter, Honoria, and Ida, a young girl visiting from New York, who share the main story. Against the lush backdrop of lazy Antibes, the girls navigate friendship, grief, adventure, homesickness, and even divorce. I'm new to the genre of graphic novels, and found Shapiro's emotional narrative and charming illustrations to be a wonderful way to experience this new angle on the Murphys' lives. I wanted to be there with them, swimming at night in the Mediterranean and dining on the fragrant terrace of Villa America.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books about girl friendships, and found this graphic debut especially wonderful. The detailed but youthful illustrations helped transport me to an earlier era in my life, and I was right there with Ida, the nine-year-old heroine, in her quest to befriend Honoria, the bold, grieving daughter of her summer caretakers. The book is populated with a who's-who of 1920s artists (Hemingway, Picasso, the Fitzgeralds), but it's not Forrest Gump. Each serves an important role in the narrative, and the story belongs to the children at its center. It's a touching story of grief and all the things flawed-but-caring humans do to survive it.

[Jonathan Schildbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved how this story was so completely specific to a time and place and the characters involved, but also universal in its themes of being a kid in the summertime, having an awareness that things aren't quite right with the adults around you, and struggling with your own complicated emotional growth in unfamiliar surroundings. The drawings are simple but effective -- I love the way Shapiro illustrates the girls' hair blowing in the wind, for example. Definitely left me hoping to someday see the further adventures of these characters.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, with some added character surprises!

[Maria Almaguer · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a sweet and nostalgic portrait. In this adult graphic novel, the author imagines Honoria, the real life daughter of Sara and Gerald Murphy, a wealthy couple who lived in a villa in France in the 1920s and entertained well known (and soon to be known) artists of the day: Pablo Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway to name but a few. Honoria is eleven years old and it's the summer after the death of her brother Baoth. Though the family is in mourning, they invite Ida, the nine-year old daughter of Gerald's old college friend, to stay with them for the summer at Villa America, their grand summer house in the south of France. But Honoria resents Ida's presence and resists her friendship. Both girls learn a lot during the summer as they swim, fossil hunt, dive, and dance, offering us a peek into a seemingly idyllic world. If you know all about the Lost Generation, the Murphys, the Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, etc. and their time in France post-World War I, you'll love this book.