Book: Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley
Genre: Graphic “novel” memoir
Publisher: First Second, Roaring Brook Press
Publication date: 2016
Pages: 291

Source: Library

A memoir about a wedding in comic book format

Summary: Lucy Knisley is in the habit of documenting the big events of her life in words and pictures, memoirs that follow the graphic novel format:

• French Milk. A month-long trip to Paris with her mother at age 22
• Relish. Memories about food
• An Age of License. A 20-something European adventure
• Displacement. A cruise with grandparents (and thoughts on aging)

Something New is Knisley’s account of her wedding and the preparations for it.

Food always makes a big appearance in Knisley’s work, so we get to learn all about the wedding feast and the artisans who produced it — starting with Jamie who owns a farm-to-table restaurant and ending with a dessert that’s anything but the run-of-mill and ridiculously expensive wedding cake. Don’t miss the recipe for poutine!

Thoughts: I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so entranced by Lucy Knisley’s pictorial memoirs. I think it’s because she’s me if I were born 25 years later and developed a drawing ability. That makes Something New particularly appropriate this year. I read about her wedding a few months before celebrating the 25th anniversary of my wedding.

I remember encountering many of the same issues that Knisley explored in Something New:

• how to make our wedding unique
• how to use that uniqueness to create a low-cost wedding
• how to protect the above two efforts in the face of the wedding-industry onslaught about what a wedding is “supposed” to be

Appeal: For anyone with fond memories or future trepidation about a wedding.

I’ll link this review to Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads. Check out her post today for culinary adventures around the World Wide Web.

Have you read this book? What did you think?