French Milk

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I really liked the travelogue elements of this graphic novel, where the author visits art galleries and fairs. Knisley’s autobiographical comics chops are on full display in her first graphic novel for kids, a fictionalized telling of her childhood experiences. It's full of angst -- of the wondering what she'll do, where she'll go when school's over -- and it's also full of food, of travel, and of culture.

I finished the book a bit jealous of Knisley's closeness with her mother, and impressed that she managed to finesse both the details and the bigger picture, a portrait of a young woman just starting out in "the real world," but taking a detour to a city full of pastries, lush dinners, cemeteries, art and adventure before she does so. Some people use mimolette as a substitute because of its orange color although it doesn’t taste like cheddar. While she both introduces and concludes her book with commentary on how her trip was supposed to reflect a significant part of her journey to adulthood, her writing doesn’t engage with this topic in any depth. They spent five weeks living in a tiny Parisian apartment, going to see museums, and eating mounds and mounds of French food. I get the feeling this book was not started as a travel journal to be published (I hope), but as a personal travel log and I think this is its biggest flaw; the audience was not a real consideration during its creation.Another thing I really loved was how Lucy was able to show her angst on her soon to be graduation from college. Lucy's memoir of her five week stay in Paris with her mother as she nears the end of her college career.

I need things to be at least a bit reflective or have at least a bit of adventure to them - this was boring even though the drawing style was good. French Milk is a travelogue, and as such, sometimes the details of each meal become less interesting toward the end. This is illustrated by an encounter with a group of American students leads her to wrinkle her nose at their "Pringles, Oreos and Seventeen magazines", their "talking loudly" and "their conversation [. If some outside commentators still find the French love of long-life milk a culinary misnomer, with a global shift towards UHT milk, they may have to start getting used to it.

It's impossible not to read this one with the later books in mind, and in that light it offers a satisfying peek into Lucy Knisley's beginnings. Since the author led me to believe that she had something to say on the issue of growing up, I was not impressed with the lack of detail and self-reflection in this piece.

A popular Cafe owner friend of mine, does not use any fresh milk for tea's or coffee, he uses Tesco Whole Long-Life whole milk (it MUST be the WHOLE MILK version, not skimmed or semi) and no-one, but no-one, has ever complained. It’s easy to understand why many foreigners in France find it rather strange that long-life milk is so prevalent in French supermarkets. All in all, this felt very guarded to me and the juxtaposition of text and image didn't really do too much for me, either. En tant que journal de voyage, et vu que je connais bien Paris, j'avoue que "French milk" ne m'a pas spécialement vendu du rêve. We avoid the microfiltered milk, because it’s very difficult to get it to make a stable foam for breakfast coffee.

And she never tells the reader what a cornichon is, nor can you tell from her sparse drawings, though her drawing of a woman's large buttocks on the final pages is not sparse - it's just plain mean.