<p>It's a picture book where I think there's a car accident and someone goes and teaches in Kuwait maybe? I wrote Kuwait down, so I'm going to say Kuwait. There are some recurring images,
and no words, and lots of orange and yellow, and I didn't really know a lot of what was happening, but maybe not a lot happened and I got it all? I don't know. MAybe it's one of those books that if I had a few courses in Islamic Art under my belt, I'd appreciate more. But I don't, so I probably didn't appreciate the book the way it was meant to be appreciated.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/20714120/book/148644621">The Gulf</a> by Tucky Fussell went on sale August 3, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

I love a good wordless graphic novel as much as the next comics fan, but this book suffered from the lack of written language. The plot was almost completely incomprehensible to me, which is unfortunate, because the premise sounded interesting. Because of this confusion, there are a few spots where I am still unsure as to whether the author meant for the book to come off as racist or not, but with my limited grasp of the storyline presented, it felt like the “narrator” (if you can call it that in a wordless novel) was being unapologetically (perhaps unknowingly) racist in several sections of the book. I was also disappointed to see that the images were pasted rather messily into the book layout, so that several pictures were either cut off on the sides, upside down, backwards, blurry, or something else that was clearly a mistake that could have been fixed with proper editing. I’m giving the book two stars because the concept is interesting, and I like the idea of a graphic novel that combines western and eastern art styles (ranging from line drawings to photographs), but it feels like a rough draft of a novel that was never completed before going to print. I wish I could comment more on the storyline, but I honestly don’t really know what happened in it, despite reading and rereading each page around 5 times.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I like a good wordless graphic novel as much as anyone, but this was too hard to follow, with really impenetrable images (however great the techniques may have been in getting them) and over-jumpy timeline.

<i>The Gulf</i> is a unique graphic novel. The author chose to tell her story without words, and I think that requires the reader to think differently about how we experience the story. I also really liked that she uses a mixed media approach to her art. That's not something that I encounter in the graphic novels I normally read. I do a lot of exercises with my students on context and close readings of stories, and this would be a work that I'd like to incorporate in my classroom because it requires student to think differently about how stories are told.

So first off I have to commend the book for not using dialogue to explain the story. I really appreciate when people try a deliver a method of storytelling that is novel or at least deviates from the standard spoon-feeding read-along route, although the foreword let's the reader know what they're in for and gives a description of the final chapter that would be open to interpretation otherwise. I felt the book drew closer to the author's real life experiences than she may have led us to believe; dates seem too specific, events had those seemingly insignificant details that I don't think an imagination would include (but that's just my opinion).
I think the finer points of the plot are open to how each reader might view it, but I experienced the story to be about is a woman who suffered brain trauma and lost herself in the accident; she lost her memories, her talents, her job, her hope; her daytime was gloomy, her nighttime was filled with nightmares crossed with flashbacks. So she sets out on a journey to piece back together whatever pieces of her old self she can find through her art, and from the shared experiences she has with people along the way she builds herself back into a whole person again. If people have gone through a traumatic event in their life, I think this book would resonate very well with them.

Downsides to the book: at some points I got a bit lost trying to piece together the story (cutscenes with Fatima and Mohamed, I don't know what was going on there, translation issues? Did the main character never get over flashbacks?), the end felt abrupt or incomplete (goodreads says the book should be about 300 pages, my ARC only had 171, I might be missing something), and in general I just had a lot of questions about the story that I feel can't be answered without a one-on-one with the author.

This is an interesting take on the graphic novel. I would recommend this more for the seasoned reader.