[Welcome to the EL Book Introductions series. These posts are all short (<180 words) introductions/reviews of books in the EL library. They focus on telling you what we think will be interesting for you, a college student and English learner, so use them to help you find the right book for you. You can also use the tags to find books about topics you might be interested in.]
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Some comic books are fun, light reading. Some are heavy, difficult books that deal with history or social issues. Daytripper is something else: it is a book about life, and it tells its story in a beautiful, sometimes heart-wrenching way.
This is the story of Bras de Oliva Domingos’ life. Bras writes obituaries (お悔み) for the newspaper. His father is a famous novelist, and he dreams of becoming a writer himself. Unfortunately, he dies at the young age of 32. Or does he? Bras dies at the end of each chapter of his story, at each stage of his life. But his story continues on the next page. This may seem confusing at first, but really it means that every chapter is an individual short story. These small parts add up to a really interesting whole, but you can start by just reading one or two.
My two cents: The whole book is set in Brazil, and so in addition to appreciating the authors’ poignant story, you can also learn a little bit of Brazilian culture, names, and a couple of onomatopoeia (擬態語・擬音語).
