Esther's Notebooks

The hilarious, heartbreaking, and painfully true life of a girl growing up in Paris, from the acclaimed comic book artist and author of The Arab of the Future

Every week, the comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend's 10-year old daughter, Esther.  She tells him about her life, her family, her school, her friends, her hopes, her dreams and her fears. And then he creates a one-page comic strip based on what she says.

This book is a collection of 156 of those strips, comprising the first three volumes as they appeared in Europe, spanning Esther's life from age 10 to 12. 

As The Guardian noted: "Each page of Esther's Notebooks is self-contained--there's usually a neat punchline--but read them all, and you come to see that Sattouf has drawn a portrait of a generation: their hopes, dreams and cultural references; the way that their personalities, backgrounds--many of the children portrayed have parents who are immigrants--and preconceived ideas about sexuality begin to play out even before they've begun secondary school. The result is a bit like a cartoon version of Michael Apted's landmark TV series, Up. These funny, well-observed comics are fantastically daring."