Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli surgeon in Tel Aviv, seems totally assimilated into Israeli society, but his complacency is upended when his wife kills herself and 19 people in a suicide bombing. Searching for answers, he travels to Bethlehem to retrace his wife's steps before the bombing and seek out the imam whom he believes led her down this path. As he descends into drink and despair, Jaafari's quest leads him into Palestine, where he's forced to confront the conditions that drove his wife to take her desperate action. Adapting a best-selling novel that was also made into a film, The Attack starkly depicts the political conflict, acknowledging the issues on both sides, but is most effective as a portrayal of a man trying to come to terms with the fact that his marriage, as well as his cosmopolitan existence and privileged status, were illusory. While the story is dialogue-heavy, the handsome and functional artwork is particularly effective at visually painting the harsh environment of the West Bank.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2016 Booklist

When his wife is identified as a terrorist, a surgeon must come to terms with her duplicity. An Arab living in Israel, Amin Jaafari is a naturalized citizen and a doctor at a Tel Aviv hospital. One fateful day a suicide-bombing suspect is brought to the hospital, and Amin identifies her as his wife, Sihem. Confounded by her violent actions, he begins his own rogue investigation into her motivations for killing herself and 19 others. Amin soon finds himself in the trenches of a war his privilege had previously kept him from and starts to discover the harsh realities of a life permanently engulfed in conflict and desperation. In this emotionally raw and ultimately disturbing graphic adaptation of Khadras novel of the same name, Dauvillier captures the somber unrest of the Middle East even as he explores marital deception and fundamentalism. Chapron's realistic and cinematic art spares its readers nothing; the visceral feel coupled with the volume's oversized dimensions creates an immersive and demanding experience. Expect this to resonate with teens interested in current events, but it should also appeal to an adult audience and could find a place on either shelf. A timely and affecting examination of extremism, marriage, and the sheer hopelessness and brutality of war. (Graphic fiction. 16 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Dr. Amin Jaafari, a naturalized Israeli citizen of Palestinian heritage, works as a respected surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital. When victims pour in from a suicide bombing, Amin assumes his usual role of saving lives. But his wife, Sihem, does not come home that night-she was the bomber. With his life and career now in ruins, Amin seeks -Sihem's collaborators in Bethlehem to demand why she had deceived him and how he had missed the signals in their apparently tranquil marriage. Yet his concerns about personal honor clash with the Palestinian militants' concerns about a broader honor: recovering their homeland and their dignity. Based on the novel L'attentat by Khadra (The Swallows of Kabul), the pseudonym of Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul, the story focuses on individual suffering among both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chapron's (Les Aventures d'Anouk et Benji) somber colored, line-based art frankly addresses feelings of destruction and hopelessness. VERDICT More a parable than a reality-based story, this immersive and disturbing work will likely satisfy few sympathizers of Israel or Palestine but will encourage discussion among adults and teens looking beyond the headlines.-MC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"IF I locked you up, it was so you could taste hate," Dr. Amin Jaafari's captor says in the extraordinary graphic novel version of Yasmina Kadra's "The Attack." "Anything can happen if you scratch at someone's self-esteem. Especially if they are feeling powerless." This is not just a simplified explanation of the complex motivations of a suicide bomber. These words, in a sense, exemplify the brutal cycle of the Middle East tragedy: Injustice leads to powerlessness, to frustration to rage, and finally to acts of violence that undercut any attempts at peace or reconciliation. Except this time, Dr. Amin - an Israeli Arab surgeon whose wife, Sihem, mysteriously disappears down the rabbit hole of radical extremism and violence - is being held in a darkened room by Palestinian radicals in the West Bank city of Jenin, not by the Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency. He has embarked on a quest across the Occupied Territories to try to unravel how and why his wife blew herself up along with innocent bystanders on a crowded Tel Aviv street. His voyage into the abyss starts in the emergency room at the hospital where he works, desperately trying to save victims of a suicide bomber, before discovering through Israeli friends that it was his wife who in fact murdered and harmed all these people. The genius of "The Attack" is that while you are led, Odysseus-like, through the back streets and alleys of Bethlehem and Jenin, meeting radicals and thugs, families who have turned violent out of deep resentment and frustration, people whose homes are bulldozed by Israeli soldiers, you are following Amin's inner journey in real time. You are also descending into the rabbit hole. What incident prompted Sihem to turn from a wife, beautiful and bright, into a killer? How did Amin lose his own Arab identity by closing himself off to the tragedy of those living in Gaza and Jenin while he pursued a secular, noninvasive life, safely cocooned in his hospital? Or, as one of the radicals tells him, "Now . . . you have experienced a bit of the horrors that your job has protected you from." There is no grand finale, no morality play, no lessons learned on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in these pages. There is, in fact, no judgment of who is wrong and who is right. There is just the deep sense of loss, horror, bereavement and finally, shock. "I have no intention of . . . taking down the group," Amin says to his best friend, Kim, a Jewish surgeon, of his quest to find out who indoctrinated Sihem. "I just want to know how the love of my life excluded me from hers." "The Attack" is not even the story of how radicals take up arms, or why Sihem strapped on that explosive vest - was it out of love for another man, or was it her own true calling? "The Attack," ultimately, is a story of lost innocence. On one of his endless wanderings, this time through an olive grove near Bethlehem, Amin meets an old Jewish man, a friend of his father's. "All Palestinian Jews are a bit Arab and Israeli Arabs cannot deny being a little bit Jewish," he muses. The old man agrees with him, but asks: "So why is there so much hate in the same lineage?" RIAD SATTOUF, A former contributor to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which sustained a terrorist attack in 2015 leaving 12 people dead, wrote "The Arab of the Future" first in French in 2014. The story, of a half-Syrian, half-French kid growing up in Libya in the strange, dark days of Qaddafi's rule from 1978 to 1984, was an instant success in France. He has come back with Part 2, which picks up in 1984. By now, the Sattouf family has returned to Ter Maaleh, Syria, the paternal village in the Homs countryside. The father, Abdel-Razak, an unappetizing bully from Page 1, teaches at a local university. He bemoans his lack of stature and money, and the fact that his sleazier relatives closer to the Assad regime have better sunglasses, houses and cars. He fantasizes about the vast garish villa he will soon build, but never does. The mother, Clémentine, a depressed Frenchwoman in exile, yearns for saucisson in a Muslim culture that bans pork. She tries to span the cultural gap, cooking pots of lentils over a portable stove, weaving a tapestry that she never completes and yearning for a washing machine or a generator. "Are you crazy?" her husband screeches. "It is forbidden! If someone reported us, I could go to prison!" "You're just saying that because it's expensive," she retorts. In between are their baffled children - 6-year-old Riad and his tiny brother, nicknamed Yahya. Riad has trouble sleeping. He tries to play with his Legos from France, but the children's games he plays with his cousins always involve killing Jews. The cultural shift from his previous life in France, or even the oddity of Libya, is a divide he finds too hard to traverse. Why are the teachers so brutal, beating children with sticks while teaching them patriotic songs? Why are they taught never to criticize Hafez Assad or his family? And why are people so afraid? The teacher is intrigued by his blond hair. "Tell me, what is your religion?" she asks him. "Are both your parents Syrian?" The question, of course, is does he have any Jewish blood. This volume of Sattouf's graphic memoir is more than just a coming-of-age story. It is a window into life under the Assads in a time of the Hama massacre, where thousands of Sunni men were butchered. It ends with a village tragedy, but one that could be a metaphor for the tragedy of Syria. LESS POIGNANT BUT impressive in its own naïve way is "Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, and Iraq," by Sarah Glidden. Glidden is a West Coast cartoonist who teams up with a gang of independent reporters to traverse the war-torn Middle East. Ethics aside - is this war tourism? - there is something heady about Glidden's learning curve. "It's so weird for me to come to places where you just can't talk about certain things," one of her friends muses. "Because people just spout their mouths off left and right in America about any damned thing they want to." Her two-month voyage is a Middle East 101, a kind of "Let's Go: Middle East for Millennials." It's a child's vision, a comic book about statistics and data of refugees in Turkey; the Kurdish question; the lingering damage of the Iraq invasion told through the eyes of her fellow traveler, a former Marine called Dan who has obvious but vital observations like: "What would be best for our foreign policy would be if we moved away from all the military stuff and started programs that would help these people." It's hard not to utter to oneself, "Duh," as Glidden gradually takes on the multilayered complexities of the Middle East. But there is something fresh in her narrative. In the midst of her cultural wanderings - the endless cups of heavily sugared tea and the bewilderment she constantly feels - Glidden pieces together something that newspaper reporters often miss while trying so hard to analyze. By talking to people and living their lives, she unearths very real people and their real stories. ? JANINE DI GIOVANNI is the Middle East editor of Newsweek and the author, most recently, of "The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches From Syria."