A Year Without Mom
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Now available in paperback, Dasha Tolstikova’s acclaimed graphic novel A Year Without Mom follows twelve-year-old Dasha through a year full of turmoil after her mother leaves for America.
It is the early 1990s in Moscow, and political change is in the air. But Dasha is more worried about her own challenges as she negotiates family, friendships and school without her mother. Just as she begins to find her own feet, she gets word that she is to join her mother in America — a place that seems impossibly far from everything and everyone she loves.
Dasha Tolstikova’s major talent is on full display in this gorgeous and subtly illustrated graphic novel.
Key Text Features
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Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.7
Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3
Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this absorbing graphic memoir follows a year in the life of a 12-year-old Moscow schoolgirl left in the care of her grandparents while her mother studies in the U.S. "Grandpa wakes me up and has the tea brewed by the time I shuffle into the kitchen, but I am on my own for everything else," Dasha explains. Working in black and white enlivened by occasional splashes of red and blue, Tolstikova (The Jacket) uses a distinctive, na f pen-and-ink style to capture the bare streets of wintry Moscow and the lively expressions of Dasha and her friends. Readers will discover that beyond the bleak Soviet setting before moving, her mother wrote "ads for places like Bread Factory #8" much of the memoir is familiar pre-adolescent territory: difficulties with friends, important exams, and clothing woes. A final section reveals that Dasha will spend the next year in the States with her mother, and the story follows their first weeks there then ends abruptly. Readers will wish the sequel were available instantly. Ages 10 14.
