HEARTCORE, Štěpánka Jislová's graphic...in both senses...memoir of coming to terms with her life

HEARTCORE
ŠTĚPÁNKA JISLOVÁ (tr. Martha Kuhlman)
Graphic Mundi (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$29.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Where does love come from?

What is at the core of romantic attachment? Does our upbringing play a part, or is falling in love a magical, uncontrollable process? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over, or can we break unhealthy cycles and learn new ways to love?

These are the questions asked in Heartcore, an award-winning graphic memoir from comics creator Štěpánka Jislová. In this empowering story of self-discovery, the author reflects on her troubled experiences in dating and love and finally seeks to understand the reasons behind her many toxic relationships. She explores topics such as normative gender roles, online dating and casual sex, alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and the psychology behind interpersonal attachment, all in an engaging graphic-novel format. By confronting her unhealthy behaviors and seeking help to come to terms with her trauma, the author provides an inspiring example of how people can change for the better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Angsty sexual abuse survivor (not depicted on the page) contemplates her manifold struggles with dating, finding what love means to her, dealing with other broken people and their issues...becoming, in other words, a grown-up. It's a messy awkward embarrassing process for us all. It's greatly to her credit that Author Jislová decided to give voice to it.

I found the art suited the subject very well indeed, the color pallette was suitably restrained, and the ideas about finding the ability to be one's messy, ungainly self to and for and in front of others as an act of love inspiring.

So why only four stars? What I wasn't quite so excited by was the sense of clinicalized detachment in her truly interesting dive into her therapy. It was not pervasive, but it was there in the whole story as a strange kind of disconnect. It's natural, in that to write of her experiences of abuse, then patterns of dysfunction requires a remove if not detachment from the pathology, but it sits oddly with the confiding tone she's after in most of the story.

That said, I feel confident in recommending it to y'all as a gift for the new-adult reader (male or female) in your ambit who is permaybehaps perplexed by the whole relationship dynamics thing. It seems to me sufficiently personal to give it standing, and sufficiently authoritative—she's lived to tell the tales with good quality help—to make her words and ideas solid and fertile ground for introspection to begin.