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A Graphic Novel
by Ondjaki, Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Book Reviewed by:A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.
The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams… and maybe even a first kiss.
Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away… As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.
Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.
Plunged into darkness during a neighborhood blackout, a boy and a girl feel emboldened to open to each other, bit by bit. Light on plot, Our Beautiful Darkness is structured like an extended prose poem, and the focus is far more on a creating a distinct atmosphere. It takes place at the tail end of the decadeslong civil war that caused devastation across the author's native Angola, although this backdrop is only referenced in passing. It feels as though the characters are deliberately pushing it from their minds for the night, allowing themselves a moment of calm amidst the storm, as though the blanket of darkness is both literally and metaphorically obscuring the turmoil of the outside world...continued
Full Review
(617 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki has been translated into English from the original Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. The process of translating a graphic novel differs somewhat from that of a more traditional prose novel. This is due to the importance of the interaction between the text and images, with each component needing to work in harmony with and enhance the other to establish a fully-formed narrative.
Hannah Chute, who has translated several graphic novels from French into English, has discussed the challenges and trade-offs of working with a visual form. On the one hand, she explains, "having the graphic on the page can give you a clue of what to use if the meaning is ambiguous" in the original language. A word in French ...
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Published 2025
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National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson brings readers a powerful story that delves deeply into life's burning questions about time and memory and what we take with us into the future.
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