A review by readingpicnic
Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir by Maureen Burdock

5.0

The art style was magnificent, and I was just in awe staring at some of these illustrations, especially the unsettling imagery of her being torn in half by a crack in the earth. I'd definitely say this falls beneath the weird girlhood umbrella, but there is a lot of trauma that comes with that as a queer immigrant from Germany with a very religious and abusive family. The storytelling and the illustrations were in a perfect balance to me in terms of my engagement, so I tried to savor this. The possible plot twist of her Nazi-supporting grandma being Jewish was wild. I think that she gives a lot of depth to her family members with internalized homophobia, antisemitism, etc. because she doesn't write them off immediately. They have failed her and shamed her in so many disgusting ways, but they also have so much that they went through that informs their ways of thinking, and she tries to learn more about their experiences through conversations with them. The part where her mom reveals that she used to have queer relations with girls in her orphanage in her argument for why lesbianism is wrong really broke my heart because that homophobia is INTERNALIZED as fuck. The overarching theme of the fragility and malleability of memory was also done so incredibly well, especially the generational aspects of it with how she doesn't remember a lot of her childhood, her mother saying that Jesus is protecting her from her bad childhood war memories, and her grandma's memories being very fragmented and repeated often. Just an incredible graphic memoir overall.
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