Nylon Road

"[Nylon Road] exposes many of the harsh realities of life in Iran, particularly for women, but also tempers it with a European perspective.  Bashi’s book will inevitably draw comparisons to Persepolis (and indeed, Bashi references and acknowledges a debt to Persepolis), but it’s a quite different book . . . Much of Nylon Road takes place in the present, after Bashi left Iran for Switzerland. She had been living in Zurich since 2004, and had been feeling dissatisfied with her situation . . . Then she started seeing various incarnations of her past selves, beginning with herself at age six . . . At age sixteen, fearful of the Iran-Iraq War; at age 35, super-patriotic and contemptuous of Arabs and religious laws; at age 23, rushing into a marriage that turned out badly . . . Her younger self couldn’t believe her present self was going to dinner parties, talking about brand names or recipes. Or at another age, she might be shocked by the way Europeans dressed, or photos in a magazine. But her present self would set about defending her current lifestyle, and between the two the reader gets the benefit of a more balanced perspective. What it really reveals is how little the two cultures really know about each other, let alone being able to understand and sympathize with each other.  It’s an eye-opening book, particularly in the treatment of women in Iran . . . But while portraying these events from her past, Bashi also speaks up about ways in which Europeans or Americans are insensitive or unfair.  The artwork . . . runs the range from exaggerated expressions to more realistic portraiture . . . The book is worth reading, if for no other reason than that there’s very little like this, and it takes guts to describe a difficult life with such honesty and candor. If everyone had access to more books like Nylon Road, then perhaps we would have an easier time taking somebody else’s perspective into account."—Jonathan Liu, Wired

"Nylon Road takes a playful tone but covers some seriously dark material along the way . . . [Bashi] starts running into previous versions of herself all over the place, and interacts with each of them in an effort to reconcile various elements of her difficult past. It's a neat trick that lends itself well to the graphic novel treatment: we get to see Bashi as she is now talking with Bashi at 21, or at 35. In one scene, for example, one of her more argumentative former selves appears at her side during a dinner party, and Bashi locks herself into the bathroom to hash things out with her. Some of her former selves are more fun to run into than others. Bashi avoids herself at 29, for example. At that age she was a young mother whose 5-year-old daughter had been taken away in court because Bashi divorced her husband. Under Iranian law at the time, a woman who asked for divorce gave up all custody rights. A straight re-creation of the event might seem overwrought, but Bashi's technique makes even such heartbreaking scenes light enough not to drag the story down.  The drawing is similarly light and fluid, not weighed down by excessive detail but effective at telegraphing ideas that would be hard to express in words . . . It's funny and inventive, and you know exactly what she's getting at. Bashi's style, in other words, takes a complicated, difficult story and makes it improbably easy to relate to."—Becky Ohlsen, BookPage