Book Review of The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics by Jessica Tamar Deutsch

I don't think I could've been any more eager to review a book than when I found out someone had turned the Pirkei Avot into a graphic novel. I love graphic novels, and one of my favorite things to do as a Jew is study Jewish ethics, so I thought this would be a beautiful intersection of two of my strongest interests. I was a little less than thrilled when I saw that the illustration style was a bit hippie for my taste, but I figured it fit in with the "do unto your neighbor" message of the Pirkei Avot's teachings, so, bring on the Hamsas! That said, when the free copy I requested for the purposes of writing this review arrived, I couldn't have been more thrilled with the beautiful colors and metallic foil on the cover. Isn't it gorgeous? I couldn't wait to see how those amazing hues would look splayed across the pages of the text illustrating the Pirkei Avot!

Immediately, I encountered a huge disappointment: those eye-catching colors from the cover don't carry over onto the pages of the graphic novel, which are printed solely in black and white. In fact, this book is marketed as if it can also be a coloring book, as if that's a benefit, and not simply the result of a small press not making the investment to include pretty color printing to add visual interest to the body of work. Though I can see some people enjoying a coloring project such as this, I can also see that many readers will be extremely disappointed by the lack of color throughout the text, especially because it is called a graphic novel. (If it were called a coloring book, that would be a different story entirely.) Also, when charging $25 plus shipping for such a volume, I, and most other readers of graphic novels, tend to expect at least some color illustrations, especially when the book has only about 120 illustrated pages to begin with. And it was clearly not designed to be a coloring book: the pages are not perforated, the book does not lay flat, the thick, dark, black ink smudges when art markers are used to color in the white space, and the paper fibers shred when even the lightest pressure is applied from said art markers. So, $25 plus shipping is very expensive for a sub-standard coloring experience OR a sub-standard graphic novel reading experience.

However, I was still totally into the concept of the material within the book, and ready to get started refreshing my memory about some of the core tenets of Jewish ethics. After all, who can't use a refresher course? I was eager to see how Jessica Tamar Deutsch had managed to structure her book in such a way as to string together so many small nuggets of advice, wisdom, and teachings into a cohesive enough whole to make a graphic novel, instead of the format of the actual Pirkei Avot, which can be frustratingly disconnected and jolting as it moves from the teachings of one sage or Rabbi to the next, and topic to topic without transitions. Surely, someone from such an artistic background who was so free-thinking and creative and felt such a personal connection with the material had found a new way in and been able to break the teachings down into themed sections, or add a narrator to the text to guide the reader through it and parse the famous quotations for applicable meaning. Nope.

Deutsch's strength is her illustrations, which serve as the backbone of the work. If you love the style of her artwork, you'll treasure this book. If you find it grating on page 15, you'll be ready to tear your hair out by page 70, which features an elderly biker dude in a skull-decorated helmet growling angrily down the road on his hog past a cartoonized cactus. I just found it all distracting and annoying, instead of enlightening and enriching. I was hoping the illustrations would help me parse some of the more difficult-to-understand passages, but instead they were too hokey and trippy for me to take seriously, even when they were accompanying very serious teachings and text. For students of any age who find the original Pirkei Avot dry and difficult to engage with, and who enjoy this style of art, The Illustrated Pirkei Avot might provide a solution to that problem. The text is large, and boiled down to only the most sparse of necessary details.

My biggest complaint about this book is that Deutsch simply got some basic things wrong. I don't know if she (or her editor) didn't properly check the details, or cared more about the art than the text (which would be unfortunate, since it is being marketed as a religious teaching tool), but some of the quotations are incomplete, others are interpreted in bizarre ways, and still others are blatantly incorrect. Aside from my personal taste with regard to the artwork (which, I fully acknowledge is just that--my taste--and may not be shared by everyone), I cannot recommend this book for any purpose because it contains inaccurate teachings/translations/quotations.