This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

by | Dec 24, 2024

There are many aspects of our lives that influence our personalities, including where we are from and where we finally decide to live. At first glance, Kay Sohini’s book, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, seems to be a love letter to New York City, where she immigrated to in her twenties, and how it made her into the person she is today. While she does show a lot of love for the Big Apple through the graphic novel format, Sohini also delves deep into her own past, including some of the uglier moments, to create this biographical work that also happens to reveal the beauty of her adopted city.

When Sohini landed at JFK (a point in time that she references throughout her story), she was looking for an escape from her grief and her past. While most people would experience trepidation moving to a new country with little money to their name, Sohini felt excitement, even relief, at this chance to rediscover herself. However, looking back to the moment of her arrival in New York has also forced her to confront the good and the bad of her past, as well as some uncomfortable truths about her family.

Sohini tells her story but does so through a series of tangents, including a discussion of what India was like in the 90’s and the early 2000s and all the food that her family used to serve when she was young. These different tangents ultimately come together to show how Sohini’s book is about community, from the family you are born into to the one you adopt. When she discusses a serious but abusive relationship she had as a young woman, it’s a harrowing account of how she was manipulated by her partner, but it’s also a story about leaving a relationship that was toxic and discovering a more supportive one (that relationship being with New York).

Though this is a text-heavy graphic novel, Sohini’s artwork contributes to the story about her relationship with New York. This graphic novel is like a travel guide showcasing the beauty of New York and the nostalgia for her native India. She paints these scenes in vivid colors that might stir one’s longing to visit New York or live there. Sohini also uses graphic storytelling to talk about emotions and events in her life that might prove difficult to talk about in just text. An excellent example of this is the symbolism she evokes when she’s standing on the words she’s truly thinking while saying the opposite. Sohini actually stands on the words she’s thinking and that thought looks as tall and as imposing as a skyscraper.

Sohini’s work does an interesting balancing act by framing her emotional and physical journey through her immigration to New York and her understanding of Western culture. The complexity and maturity of ideas, along with the subject matter, puts it within most library’s adult graphic novel section, but this book also holds up as an example of what the format is capable of when it’s put in capable hands.

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City
By Kay Sohini
Ten Speed Graphic, 2024
ISBN: 9780593836156

NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+), Older Teen (16-18)
Creator Representation:  Indian,
Character Representation: Indian,