![]() ![]() Oubrerie's scrappy, witty pen-and-ink artwork is a small delight: everybody's got exaggerated but subtly expressive body language and facial expressions, and the story's dashed-off but dead-on settings-with traffic blocked by wandering sheep and tin roofs near ambitious office buildings-make its tone of historical transition between tradition and modernization even more vivid. She was influenced to do a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, the author of Persepolis. ![]() ![]() ![]() Mostly, though, this volume is about the cheerful, communitarian spirit of the place and time it sketches out-a moment of postcolonial African history when people didn't have a lot of resources (Adjoua is entering a beauty contest in the hopes of winning cooking oil for the fritters she sells), but had high hopes for the future. It is also her first venture into graphic novels, as well as a collaborative effort with her husband, for whom Aya was his first illustrating job in graphic novels. Meanwhile, their starry-eyed friend, Bintou, is plunging into a new romance with a man whose urbane extravagance blinds her to his sneakiness. Aya's friend Adjoua has a new baby, and everybody's pitching in to help take care of him, although he looks rather less like the purported father than like an irresponsible bounder by the name of Mamadou. Is a charming comedy of manners about a group of young women-a sort of Jane Austen scenario transplanted to the Ivory Coast of the late '70s. Abouet and Oubrerie's sequel to their 2007 graphic novel Aya ![]()
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