Displacement: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley

I’m a Virgin.

Yes, it’s my first time.

I’m reading my first “graphic novel” or memoir in this case.  She (the author) calls it a travelogue but I still reserve that term for those 3-minute “News-of-the-World” films shown in between double features at the cinemas of my younger days [40’s & 50’s].

Speaking from the POV of the grandparent, I had to face up to some realities of perception from a grand-daughter’s point of view.  These were not flattering.  Nonetheless, I want to keep in vogue, and graphic novels are today’s reality, so I bit the bullet, and, I loved it.  It’s not what I think of as novel writing, but it’s entertaining and the graphics make the story shorter and get the point across immediately.  I’ve only used eleven trite phrases so far and the last one will be SAS, Short Attention Span writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who still remain virginal, this type of writing combines some graphics along with the writing of a tale, an episode, or whatever.  I still think of it as what my daughter [now 48] still calls a blog.  That’s a sprinkling of photographs along with a narrative description of a scene or adventure.  My daughter’s adventures, and blogs, have always been what every grandparent wishes for, a notch more adventuress than those of her parents. 

The author, Lucy Knisley in this case, thinks of herself as a cartoonist.  So she has moved the line forward to communicate the story almost equally between words and pictures: in her case the pictures are cartoon cels that, as they say, contain a thousand words.

Obviously this is hard to communicate with just words, so I will add in a picture from the middle of the book.

 

 

No one in the greater family wants to deal with Grandma & Grandpa who wished, in their 90’s, to go on a cruise.  Their grand-daughter said, “I’ll take them,” and thus the short story.

It will make you cry, young or old.  And it’s only 150 small pages, mostly pictures.