Raise your hand if you’ve read Persepolis 1. None of you?!?!? Please do yourself a favor, X this window and get thee to your local library and/or independent bookstore. Except for you, Lindsey Woho, of course. And perhaps Betsy. Or my mom.
Anyway. This book is, indeed, a sequel. In the same vein as Craig Thompson’s Blankets or to an extend, Art Speigelman’s Maus and Maus II, this is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir. The first volume is the growing up – little Marjane learns to survive in an increasingly totalitarian Iran, wearing her veil to elementary school but coming home to a pair of revolutionary parents. This book picks up with a teenaged Marjane, and due to the increasing violence in her hometown of Tehran, she is no longer living in Iran, but at a boarding school in Austria.
While Persepolis 1 was more about the changing Iranian culture around Marjane, this volume was more about her coming of age. Marjane is living on her own, in a country far from her parents. Things don’t go as planned. Roommates leave, landladies are crazy, and boys lead her down mistaken paths. She returns to Tehran a woman, but hasn’t yet challenged all her demons. Marjane has many of the same issues any young woman faces – should I marry my boyfriend? should I get another degree? – but with Iran under increasingly sexist control, she has to learn to play the system as well.
Buy This Book For: your mom (my mom loved it!), your sexy-intellectual girlfriend, your sister who just enrolled in her first Women’s Studies course. You can buy a paperback version that binds both volumes together. Or bonus! Give it to your favorite foreign film buff, along with the Academy Award nominated film!
