jobnik!

After reading jobnik! by Miriam Libicki, I am said to say I was not a fan! I was pretty excited because this was the first comic we were assigned to read by a female author, but it really didn't appeal to me. I may have missed important aspects of this story (which may be why I didn't like it very much), because I thought it was really hard to follow. I understood that Miriam (the main character) was involved in the Israeli army before and after the attack in the US on 9/11. This is about where I get lost.

Jobnik is a derogatory slang used by combat soldiers for soldiers with desk jobs or basically lower ranks of jobs. I understand that Miriam may represent this stereotype that some of the other soldiers had. In a way I think that she almost lived up to the stereotype because she knew she was being degraded when sleeping with men who treated her badly, but she continued doing it with others. It seems that her whole life she had been degraded by men in general, but it was almost as if she didn’t try and prevent it. It’s possible that interpreted things wrong or differently, but this is just the general sense I got from all of it.

I think the main reason I was so confused by this book was because the story itself jumped round a lot. I wasn’t really sure how some things related and I got confused when the plot would jump back in time. Because I found the story hard to follow, it made reading it a little annoying. I even got a little irritated with Miriam’s character because she never really stood up for herself and was just socially awkward most of the time. Which makes me think, again, that I may have missed some important themes of this novel.