Summary: Follows the search for a young Iranian protester who went missing in the aftermath of Iran's fraudulent 2009 elections, a search kept alive by his mother and blogger brother.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In 2009, the world watched as Iran erupted in revolt over the disputed presidential election. And yet, for all the attention paid to the major political players and masses of protesters, it's easy to miss the crucial reality that the ensuing crackdowns happened to individual people, with families, friends, and lives on the line. While this story about a young man and his mother searching in vain for his missing teenage brother—arrested during a protest and swallowed up into the void of the Islamic Republic's sham of a judiciary system—is fictionalized, it still carries with it the weight of documentary, putting a face on the wide-angle CNN panoramas and YouTube videos that captured the world's attention. As Hassan and his mother bounce in vain from hospital to courtroom to prison to cemetery (Zahra's Paradise is the name of a huge graveyard outside of Tehran), they are confronted by doublespeak worthy of Orwell and confounded by a labyrinthine bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. Khalil's pure, black-and-white cartooning is understated when it needs to be and attention-commanding when it wants to be. Both artistically and thematically, this work is rooted in the finest examples of graphic nonfiction, including Maus (1986), Joe Sacco's comics journalism, and, especially, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003). An afterword is careful to note that the creators haven't attempted to provide a neutral, even-handed look at Iran's Islamic Republic, but there is no doubting the truth in a mother's tragic words: "It doesn't take much, to lose a child in this country." Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.
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