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Summary
Summary
"At the heart of "American Widow" is the notion of Sept. 11 as a personal, rather than a national or political, tragedy, which, this achingly tender work reminds us, is exactly what it was." -- LA Times
Want to honor those who passed during 9-11? Turn off the stupid documentary glorifying all of those images we've seen over and over, and read this sincere account of how that fateful day effected one person that represents all of us." -- Aint It Cool News
"[A] raw, occasionally maddening, bracing graphic memoir... Unbearably moving." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Reading it, you feel that Torres could be your friend or neighbor; she makes an epic tragedy intimate." -- Newsday
On September 10, 2001, Eddie Torres started his dream job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The next morning, he said goodbye to his 7½-months-pregnant wife, Alissa, and headed out the door.
In an instant, Alissa's world was thrown into chaos. Forced to deal with unimaginable challenges, Alissa suddenly found herself cast into the role of "9/11 widow," tossed into a storm of bureaucracy, politics, patriotism, mourning, consolation, and, soon enough, motherhood.
Beautifully and thoughtfully illustrated, American Widow is the affecting account of one woman's journey through shock, pain, birth, and rebirth in the aftermath of a great tragedy. It is also the story of a young couple's love affair: how a Colombian immigrant and a strong-minded New Yorker met, fell in love, and struggled to fulfill their dreams. Above all, American Widow is a tribute to the resilience of the human heart and the very personal story of how one woman endured a very public tragedy.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A graphic memoir renders the trials of being a 9/11 widow. Torres relates in mostly broad strokes how she grappled with losing her husband when she was seven months pregnant. Eddie Torres, a native of Colombia, had arrived in America several years before and risen from sweatshop laborer to currency broker at Cantor Fitzgerald. His first day at his new job was September 10, 2001. The bulk of the memoir details the cruel comedy of his widow's interactions with the bureaucratic alphabet soup of NGOs and government agencies set up to help people like her, a process with numerous extra tangles because Eddie had recently been hired and his original legal status was muddy. Torres conveys weary outrage at being treated more like a symbol than a person. She cynically writes of her troubled delivery: "They handled me kindly, as a V.I.P., because I had a post-9/11 baby to deliver. Gently, gently, they cut the widow open and took out the orphaned prize." She also decries the mindless invective hurled at 9/11 widows after the media circus decided that they were lazy money-grubbers. Torres scores a few points here and there, but her gauzy and distant authorial perspective dilutes the anger, and a strange lack of detail weakens the book's message. The casual meanness thrown her way is certainly revolting, but readers know so little about her day-to-day life other than her dealings with aid agencies that it's hard to empathize with her. Stiff, blue-tinted art by New York Times illustrator Choi adds little immediacy to the narrative. Muted outrage produces muted results. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
