Girl📖

A Guide for Our Daughters

I came to this comic a bit by chance, saw the cover and was curious about it. I’m not a girl, a woman, nor anything close, but still I found the idea of a “guide to womanhood” curious and wanted to see how it developed.

And I’m really glad I did find it and decided to give it a go. I think it’s a great introduction not just to what being a woman means, but to living in our world.

Dubois explains at the beginning that she wrote the comic as a means to share what she studied trying to answer her own daughter’s questions growing up. She did do quite some research, and it shows. References are included as footnotes pretty frequently, and there’s a small bibliography at the end for each of the areas covered.

Who is the book for? From the beginning (and from the blurb at the end) it’s clear that the book is intended for girls and women from ~11 years old forward. That said, I think any non-woman can also get a lot from it. Granted, some parts are woman-specific, but others like the ones about gender identity and expression and the background on patriarchy are good for anyone to read. And as for the woman-specific ones, having everyone know a bit about how roughly half of the population “works” is probably not a bad idea. So I’d say the book is basically for everyone ☺.

I felt each topic was very well covered, serving as a good introduction and treated with the appropriate care. Dubois doesn’t shy away from statistics or “big words” such as patriarchy or intersectionality, and explains them and presents them in context. Using a comic to explain these topics works surprisingly well(1) (1)One of the things that led me to be curious about the book was another comic as an educative medium. I’ve seen some before, for a wide range of topics, sometimes to great effect. To me it’s of interest how different media can work in different ways to show or explain things in new ways. . The comic also doesn’t try to hide difficult topics or sensitive subjects (just check the contents above).

Still, it doesn’t come as aseptic or bland. One of the big advantages of comics is being able to combine powerful imagery with the text, and Dubois does it magnificently. It helps that she also speaks a lot about her personal experience, and that she introduces quotes from lots of different women at different points. It sometimes does read as a dialogue.

On non-content things, I really like the drawing style by itself, not just as support for the explanations. The use of colour is also quite good, in my opinion. It helps things look great and highlights important points, both in the drawings and the text.

The translation to English seems quite well done too. It’s a translation, though, not a localization / adaptation. The bibliography is mostly French books (although some English books appear, as well as a few English references through the text), and references to laws and most statistics refer to France. ▽ This is not a problem, mostly. Adapting it fully would be almost making a new comic. But having more books in the bibliography in English (and well, if translated to other languages(2) (2)I’d love to have it in Spanish to gift it to quite some of my friends and friends’ children! in the new target languages), or a small appendix showing local options for mobile apps or links to support groups or helplines could be a major improvement. I understand why it’s not there – it’s much more work than simply translating, and there’s no single country of destination (you can’t cover the whole English speaking world, or well, lots of other-language-worlds just with alternatives from a specific country).

The publisher is Le Lombard, and in the original French version there’s a paperback edition, apart from a digital edition. For the English translation and distribution, they partnered with Europe Comics. They are a digital-only distributor, though, so the English book is only in digital form, which is unfortunate. ▽ By the way, in some websites, like Goodreads, there’s mention of an English Kindle edition as the English edition. While there’s a Kindle edition, the comic is also sold in other stores in Adobe DRM’d epub format too, in case someone doesn’t want to use Kindle. I’d love to be able to buy paperback versions of the comic to have at home or to give to others (and as said in a sidenote, also in Spanish! Please! 😉). In the meantime there’s the digital edition, which I enjoyed.

▽ Marie Dubois as herself.

So, if you’ve reached this far I can only recommend you to get a copy and start reading. Ehm, also maybe write to Le Lombard asking for translations into other languages. And in paperback!