Israeli author Etgar Keret is known and loved, especially among younger readers, for his short, potent stories. So Jetlag, which pairs five of his tales with five different illustrators, seems a natural fit. It’s clear just five pages in that this is not your average comic book. The first story, Hatrick, has a magician retiring in despair after his innocent pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat finale yields increasingly horrific results. Keret’s deadpan tone and the restrained Picasso-esque illustrations by Batia Kolton are a perfect foil for the brutal story. Things get progressively weirder from there: X is about a girl who lives in a village near the gates of Hell and falls in love with a vacationing corpse. There’s also a zanily drawn, surreal plane-crash saga, a simple tale of a boy and his piggy bank and a story about a man who falls for a tightrope walker but ends up with her pet monkey. Highly recommended.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
