I won this book in a giveaway from Book Riot, and am leaving this voluntary review of it.
This graphic novel is delightful!! I wasn't sure what to expect, so I'm pleasantly surprised. One thing that surprised me is that it is translated from Hebrew. That would be a first for me. I have read books that were translated from Polish and from Catalan, but never from Hebrew.
The subtitle of this book is "A Guide To A Messy Life." And it is exactly that. Note that it does not promise to make anything better. There is no promise to make the messy person organized. In fact, there is an entire chapter devoted to "How to Organize without Getting Organized." What this book does is teach us that being messy is a fact of life for many of us, and that's okay. There are hints and ideas about how to make the mess look more organized. For example, "If there are pencil shavings on the desk, make a little pile out of them. It gives the impression of being organized." Also, "Random objects should be camouflaged in a straight line with office supplies."
Yes, there is humor (as indicated by those quotes). Quite a bit of it, actually. I laughed out loud many times, usually in delight. Ms. Tsarfati has done an excellent job of making me feel much less self-conscious about my messiness. I love that she calls the dishwasher the "holiest of all household objects," because "it completes the most annoying task of washing your dishes for you and also hides them inside until you have time to put them away." Heck yeah!
The opposite of that is the small trashcan that abides near (or in) the bathroom. It is the "evil king of objects. . . . The smaller it is, the more evil."
In the midst of all the humor, there are some quite profound statements, though. "We waste a lot of time in life on the physical mess, collecting it and organizing it and putting it all away, so everything looks nice. But to me, it sometimes feels like we're all pretending, or concealing a secret deep down inside."
And to sum everything up, at the end, she says that "a mess is the secret ingredient that makes the difference between a hotel and a home. Temporary residences are always more organized. (But that's because nobody really lives there.) Those places don't contain all the things that we love, or any of our failures, or our hobbies, or shoes that caught our eye, or our areas of interest and those of the people we love. Those places aren't home."
I recommend this book for people who are messy, and who love a good laugh to make them feel better about their messiness. Thank you, Einat Tsarfati, for making me feel better about my messiness.