Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

This graphic memoir chronicles the coming of age of a girl and her country, Turkey. Özge is starting school in the early 1980s, just after the coup that would place the country under a military dictatorship. She's a sharp observer of the world, writ both large and small. While primarily relying on small ink sketches, Samancı provides graphic surprise on nearly every spread.

With an inventively varied deployment of art, text, and design elements, this graphic memoir chronicles the coming of age of a girl and her country, Turkey. Ozge is starting school in the early 1980s as the book opens, just after the coup that would place the country under a military dictatorship. But don't look here for a tale of repression -- from the start, Ozge is sturdy and dramatic and impulsive, and a sharp if self-centered observer of the world writ both large (all those images of Ataturk everywhere) and small (a beloved pink ruler). While primarily relying on small ink sketches, three or four to a page, to tell her story through high school and beyond, Samanci provides graphic surprise on nearly every spread, constantly finding new ways to connect each moment to the next, such as the sequence that leads Ozge's teacher to take that ruler to whack not just Ozge's hand but that of every child in the class. (The crime? Talking about the demonstration of government censorship on television the night before.) The tone is pervasively ironic and sophisticated, but the book is never bitter, and the whole thing is a demonstration of what Ozge, consistently inconsistent in her vocational goals, only realizes in the last pages: that she was meant to be an artist. roger sutton