Happy Tuesday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Passport! I’m so excited because today I have an interview with Sophia Glock to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so excited to for you to find out more about it!
Passport by Sophia Glock Published on November 30, 2021 by Little Brown Books for Young Readers
Genres: Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Non-Fiction, YA
Pages: 320
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Author Links: Website, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Tumblr
An unforgettable graphic memoir by debut talent Sophia Glock reveals her discovery as a teenager that her parents are agents working for the CIA
Young Sophia has lived in so many different countries, she can barely keep count. Stationed now with her family in Central America because of her parents' work, Sophia feels displaced as an American living abroad, when she has hardly spent any of her life in America.
Everything changes when she reads a letter she was never meant to see and uncovers her parents' secret. They are not who they say they are. They are working for the CIA. As Sophia tries to make sense of this news, and the web of lies surrounding her, she begins to question everything. The impact that this has on Sophia's emerging sense of self and understanding of the world makes for a page-turning exploration of lies and double lives.
In the hands of this extraordinary graphic storyteller, this astonishing true story bursts to life.
If there was one fictional place you could travel to for a day, where would it be and why?
I would love to spend even a few hours in Narnia. The real estate this fictional land took up inside my brain as a child was significant and I would love to re-experience the profound wonder those books provided me as a child.
What are some TV shows, movies, and books that would pair well with Passport?
Comic books that I have personally related to intensely have been Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached.
As for movies and TV, I am tempted to list my favorite spy movies here (Hi, Atomic Blonde), but I don’t think the fantastical elements of most spy thrillers would pair well with this story. My favorite coming-of-age movies like Lady Bird or Thirteen might be more satisfying matches.
If you buried a time capsule with three items inside, what three items would you choose and why?
Well, if the point of the hypothetical time capsule is for my own benefit, something to bring me back to this time in my life and serve as a visceral reminder of this year I would bury the last sketchbook I completed, a cloth mask, and the last pair of torn-apart filthy shoes my kids outgrew. All three objects would trigger intense sensory memories of both the good and the challenging aspects of this year.
What was your favorite bit of research you ended up not using?
There was so much that didn’t make the cut: diary entries, photos, whole countries, and entire people that either got censored or just edited out for clarity. I guess the research that I truly miss is a lot of the work I did collecting information on my very early years, which ultimately did not apply to the coming-of-age story I developed. It was very fun writing a completely oblivious, but curious child version of myself exploring some very iconic settings and I only got to depict a little of that in Passport. But who knows? Maybe the character of five-year-old Sophia will get to do something else in a future book.
What is your favorite quote, scene, or moment from Passport?
That is so tough to narrow down, but I wrote a scene between the character of Sophia and her sister Julia, where they have a discussion late at night in their bunk beds, one on the top bunk and the other on the bottom, which is something we did a lot growing up. I enjoy it both for the visual as well as the fact that I think I distilled what, in real life, was a series of conversations between my sister and I, into a few lines of dialogue. Julia tries to warn Sophia “…it’s just that guys, they want just one thing from girls.” and Sophia’s response is “What makes you think that bothers me?”
About Sophia Glock
Sophia Glock is a cartoonist who lives in Austin, TX. Her graphic memoir, Passport, is on sale now from Little Brown Young Readers.
Sophia’s comics and cartoons have been published in The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Narratively, MUTHA Magazine, and Time Out New York. Her work has also been featured in various anthologies including, Ink Brick, Suspect Device, Quarter Moon, DIGESTATE, Rabid Rabbit, and Kilgore Quarterly. Her collection of comics Born, Not Raised was selected to be included in The Society of Illustrators Cartoon and Comics Art Annual 2016 and her short comic The Secrets in My Mother’s Nightstand was shortlisted for The Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Web Comic of the Year in 2016.
In 2008 she was a recipient of a Xeric Foundation Grant for her comic, The Deformitory. She is also the author of The Lettuce Girl, SemiSolid, Over Ripe and Passport: Fig. You can pick up her mini comics at indie-friendly stores across the country, or from Bird Cage Bottom Books.
What do you think about Passport? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!
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