Victory Parade

AN NPR, WASHINGTON POST, GUARDIAN, AND PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The author of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Unterzakhn now gives us a heart-wrenching, phantasmagorical tale of love, loss, and trauma both personal and global, set during World War II in Brooklyn, New York, and in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

One of a group of women working as welders in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rose Arensberg has fallen in love with a disabled veteran while awaiting the return of her husband, Sam, a soldier in the American army serving in Europe. As we follow the bittersweet, heartbreaking stories of Rose and her fellow Rosie-the-Riveters, we’re immersed in the day-to-day challenges of life on the home front as seen through the eyes of these resilient women, as well as through the eyes of Eleanor, Rose’s impressionable young daughter, and Ruth, the German Jewish refugee Rose has taken into their home.

Ruth’s desperate attempt to exorcise the nightmare of growing up in pre-war Nazi Germany takes her into the world of professional women wrestlers—with devastating consequences. And Sam’s encounters with the horrors of a liberated concentration camp follow him home to Brooklyn in the form of terrifying flashbacks that will leave him scarred forever.

Victory Parade paints a deeply affecting portrait of how individuals and civilizations process mass trauma. Magnificently drawn by Leela Corman, it’s an Expressionist journey through the battlefields of the human heart and the mass graves of genocide.