Thanks to my relatives in France, I was able to snag this before its American release. This series has been a key part of my learning the French language, I've enjoyed it thoroughly, and I was excited to find out what was in store for Riad and his family after their father's terrible actions at the end of the fourth book. I wasn't disappointed by this one, but after the massive size of the fourth, it does feel a little brief by comparison.
Book five also swings from the more external-facing viewpoint of the previous four and into something more internal as Sattouf wrestles with his adolescence and the difficulties of being a short, semi-effeminate boy in the extremely hierarchal and unaccepting world of middle and high school (or the French equivalents thereof). Meanwhile, his mother is justifiably broken by the events of the fourth book and spends much of this one spiraling further into depression and mania. I wish that had been explored a bit more but I get it: this is an age in which children tend to become very wrapped up in themselves and their own struggles, so at the time for Sattouf his mother's mental well-being was probably less of a pressing issue than his unrequited love for a fellow student. Throughout her scenes, I found myself reflecting a lot on the way human beings tend to turn toward the supernatural when their sense of being in control of their lives gets pulled away from them. This echoes a lot of Abdel's journey from "modern nonbeliever" to "pious fundamentalist" in earlier books.
This book also features almost no scenes set in the Middle East (save for Riad's imaginings), which is reflective of Sattouf's lived reality but removes some of the "a look into another world" aspect that's fascinating about the first four books. Instead I'm looking into early-90s French high school, which is a *whole lot* like the early-90s American high school I went to (I'm one year older than Sattouf). So while I completely identify with growing my hair out and wearing flannel, it's not much of a window into a new experience for me, particularly as someone who grew up thinking he was going to draw comics for a living and who spent years longing for a fellow student who didn't return his affections! It's interesting to see Sattouf grappling with his own Syrian heritage in comparison to the gangs of Arabic youths who live in Rennes, and I understand why some people see some internalized racism in his depictions. I think, though, that it's valuable to note that Sattouf doesn't exactly spare the French from criticism here, either: the kids are almost uniformly awful, and the adults are rarely better - many of both groups are racist, nearly ALL of them are massive homophobes (Riad's grandfather chief among them), and a good chunk of them are just as prone to backward superstition as any of Sattouf's Arabic characters - that tendency just manifests itself in different ways.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but found the ending of this one to be a little rushed and it left me a little cold. It's neither a cliff hanger nor a resolution, and though I'm already looking forward to the next in the series, I also found myself wanting a tiny bit more from this particular entry.