Soldier's Heart

In the wake of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Art Spiegelman's Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tyler's multigenerational graphic memoir, Soldier's Heart. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. Soldier's Heart is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tyler's ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her father's memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter's struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tyler's work has an accessible, homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with "snapshots" of Tyler family life), Soldier's Heart is a sophisticated graphic work about war, love, and loss.