Aya by Marguetire Abouet and Clément Oubrerie

Aya

Aya is a serious-minded 19-year-old living in the Ivory Coast in the 1970s. It's a time of prosperity for the country, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Aya tries to give her friends good advice and resigns herself to helping them manage the fallout of bad choices. In this first book of six, for example, Aya helps her friend Adjoua raise her newborn son as they try to prove his paternity so that Adjoua's boyfriend will marry her. Aya joins in the parties, and the gossip around her but always with an eye toward her future. This is a realistic, funny, soap operatic story about middle-class life from a talented storyteller.

Appeal: Ivory Coast, Africa, family relationships, adult relationships, drama, humor, high school plus

Art: Caricature, cinematic

Text: Conversational, vernacular, argumentative

Other: Aya was originally published in French. The comic was adapted into an animated film in 2012, co-directed by the authors.

Awards: Aya won the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for First Comic Book in 2006, the Children's Africana Book Award in 2008, and several Glyph Awards.

Abouet, Marguerite. Oubrerie, Clément. Dascher, Helge. Aya. Montréal : Drawn & Quarterly ; 2007. Print