Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine

by Anaele Hermans, Delphine Hermans (Artist)

Overview

The graphic novel collaboration and true story of two sisters. Anaële, a writer, leaves for Palestine volunteering in an aid program, swinging between her Palestinian friends and her Israeli friends.
Delphine is an artist, left behind in Liège, Belgium. From their different sides of the world, they exchange letters. Green Almonds: Letters from
Palestine is a personal look into a complex reality, through the prism of the experience of a young woman writing letters to her sister about her feelings and adventures in the occupied territories. Green Almonds is an intimate story with big implications. A young woman discovers a country, works there, makes friends,
lives a love story, and is confronted with the plight of the Palestinians, the violence on a daily basis that we see on our screens and read in our newspapers.
Anaële's story is brought to life by Delphine's simple and evocative drawings, which give full force to the subject and evoke the complexity of this conflict, creating a journey to the everyday life of Palestinians.Green Almonds:
Letters from Palestine received the Doctors Without Borders Award for best travel diary highlighting the living conditions of populations in precarious situations when it was published in France in 2011.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941302897
Publisher:	Lion Forge
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	1,236,235
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	13 - 16 Years

Editorial Reviews

06/11/2018
In this humble epistolary graphic memoir, Anaële Hermans leaves her native Belgium to volunteer at a youth center in Palestine. She charts her travels in letters and postcards—which her artist sister Delphine illustrates in black and white with strategic charm—of a land where guns and checkpoints trample a pastoral way of life. Their correspondence, punctuated by Delphine’s carefully shaded bowls of fruit and almonds, depicts the intersection of the unimaginable and the mundane. Anaële describes a “Swiss cheese” landscape where Israeli settlers have taken all the hills, squeezing Palestinians into the lowlands. The opening presents a cavalcade of facts, matching Anaële’s saturation as a wide-eyed foreigner, but the story picks up when she falls for a local guy named Majdi and her investment in Palestine becomes personal. When Anaële returns to Belgium, she encounters stark lines, in contrast to the gentle shades and dark corners of Palestine. There is no shortage of travel narratives by Westerners whose eyes are opened in war torn countries, but Anaële doesn’t pose herself as a savior. She is simply a visitor who shares her life and labor with people in a difficult situation; together they create small, human spaces beneath the barbed wire of conflict. If the Hermans’ thoughtful, poignant travelogue feels unresolved, it’s because anything else would be fiction. (July)

Publishers Weekly