Review: "Yazidi!" by Aurélien Ducoudray and Mini Ludvin

Yazidi! by Aurélien Ducoudray, illustrated by Mini Ludvin
Translated by Allison M. Charette
Published May 2023 via Europe Comics
★★★★

Yazidis, a minority group who practice an equally minority religion, have faced persecution for centuries—most recently from ISIL. Yazidi! tells the story of four young girls, sisters and cousins, living in the shadow of ISIL (also known as IS or ISIS). They're Yazidi, and while Mounia and Zina are living in the city with their parents, safe enough from threats, things are about to get very, very hard for Zéré and Nizra.

I picked this up for the cover but also because I know so very little about Yazidism. I love how clearly contemporary this setting is: the older girls in particular are as ready as any modern teenager to use their phones for selfies and covert flirting—and worried about keeping their parents from noticing toooo much.

There's some information about Yazidism here, though I found it necessary to supplement with Wikipedia at the very least. I would have loved more detail—among other things, what the daily lives of the girls, in the city and more rurally, look like; how they envision their futures; more about religion—but the illustrations are beautiful, and I'm glad the book is careful to separate ISIL from ordinary Muslims. There's also a clear attempt to find an ending that is happy but also realistic—this is no dystopian novel in which teenagers overthrow the oppressors and start a more equal society; it's a story in which the conflict can't end with the graphic novel because it's ongoing in real life. I'd be quite interested to see a follow-up graphic novel written about these girls when they're a bit older.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.