KDL Recommends

A stunning and emotionally resonant
autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother.

While living in North Korea’s capital for two months on a work visa for a French film animation company, Delisle observed what he was allowed to see of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered.

As Houdini prepares for a death-defying leap into the icy Charles River in Boston, biographer Jason Lutes and artist Nick Bertozzi reveal Houdini’s life and influence on the American public.

A V.A. hospital file clerk and comic book writer, Harvey chronicles the
ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. His dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships.

When Nasser Ali Khan, the author’s great-uncle, discovers that his beloved instrument is irreparably damaged, he takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all its pleasures. Over the course of the week that follows, we are treated to vivid scenes of his encounters with family and friends, flashbacks to his childhood, and flash-forwards to his children’s future.

Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

A devastating story about growing up in a silent, angry household with
miserable parents. With its menacing, child’s-eye view of Detroit smokestacks, hospital corridors, and scowling, bespectacled adult faces looming up close, Stitches reads like a silent horror movie.

Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in the lower Manhattan neighborhood where they had lived for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.

A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father’s story and history itself.

Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, Blankets explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. A tale of security and discovery, of playfulness and tragedy, of a fall from grace and the origins of faith.

In the spring of 2003, a bomb raid hits the Baghdad Zoo and a pride of four lions—two females, Safa and Noor; a male, Zill; and a cub, Ali—is freed. With no cage and no keepers, the lions fend for themselves in the war-ravaged city. Having been kept in the zoo, the lions had always dreamed of freedom; once outside, they see the true horror in the world.

A moving portrait of friendship that focuses on an urgent message of acceptance and the struggles of living with AIDS.

As alienated kids go, Jin Wang is fairly run-of-the-mill: he eats lunch by himself in a corner of the schoolyard, gets picked on by bullies and jocks and develops a sweat-inducing crush on a pretty classmate. Oh, and his parents are from Taiwan. This much-anticipated story about growing up different is a fable for every kid born into a body and a life they wished they could escape.