Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

A Family Tragicomic

Good, 4 stars

This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home,' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.--From publisher description.

Details

ISBN9780618871711
Copyright Date2007
Publication DateJune 5, 2007
PublisherMariner Books
FormatTrade Paperback
No. of Pages232
LanguageEnglish
NotesLambda Literary Award Finalist
RatingGood
GenreGraphic Novel
SubjectCartoonists - United States; Cartoonists/ United States/ Comic Books, Strips, Etc; Fathers And Daughters; Graphic Novels; Lesbians - United States