I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This

With two prominent intellectual parents (cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, and Françoise Mouly, New Yorker art editor, graphic novel publisher, and recipient of numerous artistic awards), Spiegelman must grapple with her legacy but finds the more challenging endeavor to be reconciling the barrier between her mother and herself. She traces her life in contrast to her mother to see the lines of difference, but she also comes to learn the ways in which they are more alike than she imagined. In the audio edition, Spiegelman wavers in her reading. At times, her delivery drones on without much inflection and energy. In other sections, and particularly those with dialogue, her voice becomes lively with emphasis and emotion. Her most impressive feat in narrating comes with her seamless shifts into French accents and even French itself as she moves through conversations in her mother’s native tongue. A Riverhead hardcover. (Aug.)