'The Provocative Collette' with story and art by Annie Goetzinger is a graphic novel about Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette during a specific period in her life.

Colette was born in a less well off family and married off to womanizer at the age of 20. This graphic novel shows Colette as powerful and capable. Her early writing was taken by her husband, whom she would soon divorce. This also follows her early years.

I would have liked a better introduction to this person, in a better foreword or afterword. I felt a lot of disinterest while I read this because it didn't really help me understand why I should care about this person. The art, on the other hand, was quite good, but that's hardly a reason to recommend this graphic novel.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from NBM Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

I had a bit of trouble reading this book because of formatting issues. The handful stories I was able to read were wonderful and the illustrations were simply lovely. I think calling it provocative is a bit beyond the scope but I would still recommend it. I'm always game for a unique graphic novel and this one delivers.

I always feel like I should know more about Colette and the Belle Epoque than I do, so this seemed like a great entry point. It was a nice biography and a good introduction to Colette's life, but it hasn't really stuck in my memory.

After some initial download issues I managed to access this book, the drawings are exquisite and capture the time perfectly, it also gives an interesting introduction to her life.

Perhaps not quite as provocative or erotic as the title and cover of the book would suggest, "The Provocative Colette" is nevertheless an exciting read. Involving, elegantly drawn and kind of epic in scope, this is one graphic novel you won't forget easily.

I'm always excited to see a good comic book biography flit across my shelves; there are some truly beautiful ones making their way into library collections and onto bookstore shelves at the moment, and "The Provocative Colette" is part of this ongoing trend. This is perhaps not the strongest example; the language felt a bit stilted, as if the translation's accuracy had been privileged over readability, and the art style is attractive but not quite pushing the envelope. That is, this volume is constrained by the shared challenges facing <i>all</i> illustrated biographies—limited page-space, the difficult balance between text and image, and a need to impress readers on all fronts—and it doesn't really rise above them. The best picture book biographies, in my opinion, use one moment to access a person's larger story ... but Goetzinger tries to cover several decades of Colette's life, which as other reviewers have already pointed out, requires the book to progress at a blistering pace to cover all of the various important events. All this to say, this is an accomplished piece of illustrated nonfiction, but it is not necessarily entertaining. I'd take a peek at future works by Goetzinger, however, as I think there's quite a lot of potential to this kind of work.

I became interested in this comic book/graphic novel because it covers a period in Colette’s life that’s not as well known and documented as her later period – Colette’s formative years during her marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars and immediately after her divorce. In this younger Colette we find a woman who is “at once wise and unconventional, sweet and vindictive, steadfast and fickle, natural […] and affected”, as Nathalie Crom says in her Introduction. The Introduction aside, however, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d thought I would. For one thing, I didn’t like the drawing very much; the colouring was subdued and uninteresting and the pencilling itself was not as highly accomplished as I’d expected. The other problem was the rendering of the story: it was too fragmentary and quickly paced covering large stretches of Colette’s life without sufficient depth and detail. As a result, the reader had to rely on the introduction to fill in the gaps, thus creating a vicious circle: without the introduction the reader has difficulty following the story, but, having read the introduction, the graphics do not add much to the main story. So overall: the concept was good and had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the implementation left much to be desired.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.