To: Michael Green
From: Asha Riley
Date: March 20, 2023
RE: Text Adoption Recommendation
Woodland High School is proposing two books for adoption. Both are graphic novels requested for use in a 12th-grade elective English class that focuses on graphic novels. In both cases, the instructional materials committee unanimously recommended the books for adoption.
Anya’s Ghost: A coming-of-age story in graphic novel format by Vera Brosgol. In the novel, unpopular Anya befriends the ghost of Emily, a girl around Anya's age who died 90 years earlier. After failing to make Anya popular and happy, Emily becomes manipulative and controlling, leading Anya to discover the truth about Emily's death. Well received by critics, Anya's Ghost is the recipient of Cyblis, Harvey, and Eisner awards. Production of a film adaptation of the novel was supposed to begin by the end of 2017.
Maus: A graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father, Vladek, about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material and information for the Maus project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father and the absence of his mother, who died by suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, structure, and page layouts.