AUTHOR: Josh Neufeld
STARTED: September 24, 2009
FINISHED: September 24, 2009
PAGES: 208
GENRE: Graphic Novel
FIRST SENTENCE: [I returned the book to the library before I remembered to grab the first sentence. Whoops!]
SUMMARY: [From barnesandnoble.com] A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is a masterful portrait of a city under siege. Cartoonist Josh Neufeld depicts seven extraordinary true stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina.
Here we meet Denise, a counselor and social worker, and a sixth-generation New Orleanian; “The Doctor,” a proud fixture of the French Quarter; Abbas and Darnell, two friends who face the storm from Abbas’s family-run market; Kwame, a pastor's son just entering his senior year of high school; and the young couple Leo and Michelle, who both grew up in the city. Each is forced to confront the same wrenching decision–whether to stay or to flee.
As beautiful as it is poignant, A.D. presents a city in chaos and shines a bright, profoundly human light on the tragedies and triumphs that took place within it.
THOUGHTS: This book is quite stark - their was anger and fear and overly saturated colors, but the work never came across as melodramatic. The stories are real and, instead of feeling narrated, the characters feel as if they are reliving the horrors of what they went through in Katrina. Neufeld does a particularly good job about making the story about what happened and not just dumping on what went wrong. He set out to capture what people lived through, and he succeeded magnificently.
The images in this book are not complicated - the art itself is nothing to write home about. The colors, however, help to tell the story. Images are saturated and, on many pages, are monochromatic. Each color on the page helps to shape the mood of the story. Neufeld also includes just enough recognizable images that were prevalent in the news to make this story connect with all readers.
Neufeld has created the insider's story without turning it into a Dateline investigation.
RATING: 8/10 [Terrific]
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