Saturday, July 11, 2020

A Memoir of Escape: Talking to Strangers by Mariane Boucher

Graphic novels suit every genre. Important is to have a golden balance between the graphic part and the text. 
Talking to Strangers by Marianne Boucher is a special kind of work, because it approaches the author´s experience in her late teens with the highly controversial cult of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. The cult has an institutional component facilitated by the intricacies of the Cold War but its more intimate development had to do with the Moon´s religious ideology. 
Marianne was at the time a professional skater that moved to Santa Monica, California, from Canada. The cult members approached her on the beach and she thought she was given the chance to save the world and to live a selfless life of universal love. Soon, she will be caught into the cult´s brainwashing mechanisms and only the resilience of her mother saved her from their grip.
The story is relatively simple and linearly told, the strongest point of the book being the graphic part: realistic, with a dynamic of the lines and a bold lettering. 
Since leaving behind her teenage cult adventures, Marianne Boucher is working for over 30 years as a courtroom sketch artist for a Toronto-based TV station. 
An enjoyable graphic novel read with some good food for thought about the inerent methods of brain manipulation of religious cults.

Rating: 3 stars

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