Thank you to Macmillan Publishers for including Kid Lit Frenzy in the blog tour for DARE TO DISAPPOINT.
DARE TO DISAPPOINT: Growing Up in Turkey
by Özge Samanci
Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR (November 17, 2015)
Nonfiction * Comics * Biography
Audience: Ages 14 and up
IndieBound | WorldCat
About the book:
Growing up on the Aegean Coast, Ozge loved the sea and imagined a life of adventure while her parents and society demanded predictability. Her dad expected Özge, like her sister, to become an engineer. She tried to hear her own voice over his and the religious and militaristic tensions of Turkey and the conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism. Could she be a scuba diver like Jacques Cousteau? A stage actress? Would it be possible to please everyone including herself?
Quick thoughts on this book:
Özge Samanci unique mixture of illustrations and real objects combine together with her heartfelt words to provide readers with a touching and funny graphic memoir of growing up in Turkey.
Samanci provides readers with the challenges and pressures she faced in learning how to balance what her dreams were with the expectations of her family, and country. Readers connect over the universal similarity that all of us share in the struggle to create our own identity and as well as what decisions will we ultimately make about our lives.
And don't you just love the art?
At each stop, Samanci is sharing something personal that is part of her upbringing and included in some format in her book, Dare to Disappoint. Today, it is a doily.
I saw a paper doily first time in the States and I cracked up. Doilies remind me fake fire places. A real lacework is the product of meticulous work, attention, and grace. But a paper doily is generated by using machinery. I love paper doilies and I still laugh at them. In Turkey, while I was growing up almost every furniture used to have some kind of lacework cover. Women worked hard with little needles to create these lacework pieces. There would be lacework covers everywhere. On the coffee tables, on the shelves, sometimes even on top of the television set. Some people covered their home telephone with a tiny lacework cover. I used a paper doily as a collage material to refer the laceworks from my childhood.
About the author:
Ozge Samanci is an artist and an associate professor. She was born in Izmir, Turkey, and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. Dare to Disappoint is her debut graphic novel.
For a complete listing of blog tour stops, click here. For Friday's stop: The Book Wars