A Washington Post Top Graphic Novel of 2024!
"With dreamlike drawings reminiscent of Chagall, Kercheval welcomes us into her meditation on family history, motherhood, grief, love, and displacement, rendered in colors so beautiful they're almost edible."
— Leela Corman, author of Victory Parade
“French Girl is an arresting and beautiful memoir that evokes the infinite complications of daughterhood and motherhood in raw, gorgeous color. It pulses with heart, figuratively and literally."
— Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
“Poet and memoirist Kercheval (Space) makes a vibrant graphic debut in this gathering of loosely connected reveries on family history.... Kercheval writes with a musing, inquisitive voice but also embroiders her accounts with fairy tale flourishes. The description of the dozens of antique clocks displayed in her friend Jackie’s house gives way to a journey through a Narnia-like door to a distant forest; elsewhere, there are pricked fingers and glass coffins.... Kercheval’s arresting, mostly full-page pastel illustrations possess a dreamlike quality reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall (with nods to Cocteau). These evocative personal allegories unearth the knotted roots feeding a very particular family lore. Readers will be beguiled.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in 17 connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic—a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake—as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
