Today is the final day of Banned Books Week and as we continue to encourage and celebrate the freedom to read, this week’s staff pick is one of the most challenged books of the last few years. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is a poignant and sad but also hilarious and beautiful graphic memoir. Challenged in several colleges across the country, it’s one of the most celebrated graphic novels and was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical.
“Meet Alison’s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter’s complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic — and redemptive.” —Amazon
