Long Story Short

January 27, 2020
Brown (The Phantom Twin) condenses classic and contemporary literature into summary comic strips, usually (though not always) three panels long in this feather-light collection. Sometimes she achieves the laugh: Interview with the Vampire is summarized as “It’s all fun and games until you have a kid”; the Walden strip pokes fun at Thoreau for living in Emerson’s backyard; and boiling the entire Bhagavad Gita down to three panels could only end in absurdity. But more often, each strip states the book’s premise or quotes a line without adding special perspective beyond the accomplishment of diminishment. Serious, hard-to-joke-about works like The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Beloved are reduced to pithy platitudes (e.g., “The legacy of slavery is haunting” superimposed on a ghost at a gravestone). There’s nothing wrong with the literal approach to this exercise, per se, but the Cliffs Notes level of commentary can be disappointing, and the better strips leave the rest paler. Brown’s simple but playful and boldly colored art carries off a visual unpretentiousness that suits the erudite-lite material. The result is a cute gift book with just enough going for it, though it could do with more punch.

May 15, 2020
So this isn't Shakespeare. No, wait . . . but it is! King Lear: My daughter is DEAD! Romeo and Juliet: My girlfriend is DEAD . . . Not really. Hamlet: I am DEAD. Okay, so it's not Moby Dick, and yet, here's man hunting beast: Captain Ahab is going to get that whale if it KILLS him. Hey, whales are really big! It DID kill him. Author-illustrator Brown even condenses hubby Lemony Snicket's 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events to Adults are incompetent . . . or evil. Well, then. Pithily reductive, Brown distils a hundred books, some short stories, and a few poems, each into three(-ish) clever panels presented in 11 playful chapters? Big Thoughts pairs the Old Testament with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird; Friends and Frenemies features The Great Gatsby and Harriet the Spy�. Brown even sustains the chuckles to the final pages. Her Index by Subject boasts such droll entries as Hegemony, Painful Continuation of, under which Little House on the Prairie can be found. Long story short? It's lighter than CliffsNotes and quite possibly more entertaining than the originals (the horror, the horror!).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

May 22, 2020

Gr 9 Up-Like a snarky SparkNotes, this mischievous, charming collection turns 100 classics into brief comic strips. Brown is an observant reader, and her comedic timing is impeccable. "Writers make the best of friends," she notes in her summary of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. "And then they DIE." At times, she pushes readers to reconsider the canon. She transforms the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie from American heroes to "pioneers with a sense of entitlement," and she pokes fun at Henry David Thoreau's hypocrisy, pointing out that while writing his ode to self-sufficiency, Walden, or a Life in the Woods, he enjoyed "a lot of visitors and trips into town." Other comics are more homage than send-up-for Toni Morrison's Beloved, Brown depicts the ghostly outline of a young woman standing by a gravestone: "The legacy of slavery is haunting." While violence, nudity, and sexual scenes are included, the gentle, graceful cartoons and childlike characters keep the volume from becoming disturbing-even images of Oedipus with his eyes gouged out or dying soldiers on the Western Front are graphic without being distressing. The book's three indexes offer further opportunity for subversive fun (the subject index features categories such as "therapy, much-needed," "ew," "bodies, dead," and "bodies, undead"). VERDICT Literature students bored with their required reading will delight at this off-kilter look at the canon.-Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal

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