1992 Pulitzer Prize winner
A 2015 Top Ten Popular Paperback for Teens
Maus has been on my to-read list for ages, so when it popped up on the Popular Paperbacks for Teens list, I took it as a sign to finally read it. It's sort of a biography of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It's also about the thorny relationship between the father and son. While Vladek's story is told chronologically with each chapter focusing on one story, Art frames it with whatever is going on in his father's life in the present as he tells the story, whether they're walking to the bank or going to the grocery store. And Art includes his struggles as well - how to tell the story, his arguments with his father, his feelings about growing up with the specter of not only the war but also his older brother who died at a very young age. The art is great, simplistic, but Art manages to infuse each of the characters with plenty of emotion (which is no easy feat when you're drawing anthropomorphized mice and cats!). It's pretty clear why Maus is so revered. Even though Vladek does nothing more than survive, in the light of the atrocities of the Holocaust, even that seems like a triumph. This is easily one of the best examples of the vitality of comics and how well they can be used to tell stories.
(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)
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