well, that was depressing.

i wanted to read this so i could learn about the life of billie holiday, whose voice i have always loved. but all i learned was that she was hurt, beaten, taken advantage of, and disregarded in a myriad of ugly ways.

even the introduction to the graphic novel is nothing more than an account of and rumination on her suffering. there may be some value in recounting all this pain, but it should not be all there is.

billie holiday is more than just the tragedy of her suffering and early death.

i do like the idea that she lives on now as "a voice without a body," but that was the only positive thing i got out of this bleak book. i'm going to read her Lady Sings the Blues so i can gain some real perspective on the life of lady day.

Thank you to NetGalley and NBM Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book in return for an honest (and belated) review.

A stark and bleak rendering of events in the life of one of the greats, Billie Holiday. The graphics infuse and support the text, giving it deep expression and resonance. Haunting.
---Ronb

The introduction is interesting but the sarcasm does not really work. The artwork and the story showcase Billie's ups and downs. The artwork is very stark black and white, her story is not so simple. Told from the point of view of a reporter researching her life the story recounts her lows, arrests, drug addiction and highs, writing Strange Fruit

Going into this you should be very aware that Billie Holiday lead a hard and tragic life. It's not something that could or should be left out of any telling of her life. The problem I had with this telling is that it focuses solely only on the horrific abuses that she endured. I feel like we could hear more about her music and relationships without loosing the rawness of her reality.
I also had a hard time with the art style. The heavy, blocky art made it hard for me to differentiate changes in locations and characters. I had to reread pages several times to try and peg down what was going on and who was talking.
The story left me wishing I knew more about Billie Holiday rather than making me feel like I had learned anything new about an icon of history.

This is a gritty, noirish look at the life of Billie Holiday.

As the story begins a newspaper writer is given the task of putting together a special piece to honor the 30th anniversary of Billie Holiday's death. The reporter doesn't even know the name - Billie Holiday. The rest of the book unfolds as the cold hard facts of the research get interspersed with flashbacks to "real life", the story behind the story. the reality that is more nuanced, less black and white than the impersonal facts presented 30 years later.

Billy Holiday by Carlos Sampayo is a commentary on the realities that Billie Holiday suffered through and on the injustices of the times she lived in.

The artwork, fittingly enough, is full of heavily lined figures in plays of shadow and light as they help to illustrate the grey areas that made up the truth behind much of the legend. Good stuff!

***Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this title.

One thing I really liked about the black/white artwork style. It supports the overall theme and mood, but otherwise I found the book to be awkwardly paced and a bit confusing. Nothing about it really held my interest. Although it accurately represented the gloominess of Billie's life, it felt more exploitative than anything.

This story was really raw and graphic. If you can get past the introduction chapter (which is like trudging through molasses made of strange tense changes, random lyrical metaphors, the author informally referring to herself and the reader as “us”, and tangents of random facts thrown in with no explanation), then you find a really graphic depiction all the ways that Billie Holiday was raped, tortured, and victimized by the people in her life, told in a graphic novel format.

So, on the one hand this made me incredibly angry at everyone who ever hurt her. She came across a lot of horribly sexist, racist, sadistic people, many of whom were cops. It’s nice that this biography didn’t try to romanticize or make light of those events, especially considering that her autobiography and other accounts had to be watered down for legal reasons. Having her story honestly told made me feel so much more respect and heartbreak for her.

On the other hand, this entire story is told with a framing device of a journalist researching Holiday on the 30th anniversary of her death. That journalist is looking up all of these horrible events and making very blasé commentary on them. And at one point the journalist calls someone on the phone and the comic panels start switching back and forth between “past” and “present” but it’s really difficult to tell what’s going on. Then there was a very literary but vague point being made that no one respected or cared about Billie Holiday while she was alive and all her notoriety came posthumously. There were no good qualities about Billie Holiday shared. There were more panels and speech bubbles from corrupt cops and racist taxi drivers and racist Hollywood directors and disgusting rapists than speech bubbles from Holiday herself. It felt like all of the attention and power was given to the vile people around her. Maybe that was intentionally because this biography is supposed to incite anger and disgust towards those individuals? It just didn't work for me.


I feel like if I really wanted to learn about Holiday and support her in a way that gives her agency, I should read her autobiography. This book felt very exploitative and belittling, even though I truly believe it was going for the opposite of that. It was just not good.

Stark, sad, and full of beauty. Like early Art Spiegelman.

This is a graphic novel does not shy away from the abuse Holiday faced during her brief life. The premise consists of a reporter doing a story about her life for the 50th anniversary of her death. What we get are snippets on how men used and abused the singer. While I enjoyed reading it, I would have appreciated a more nuanced view of the singer's life.

Exploring this graphic novel was an interesting experience, as it shed light on such an iconic musical genius, while illustrating her resilience amid shadows of white supremacy, misogyny, etc.

I read this whilst listening to Billie Holiday sing like an angel. Such an amazing voice setting the backdrop for me to learn about her life in this absolutely stunning graphic biography.
Told as a story of a journalist writing an article about her to commemorate the anniversary of her death, it tells of her struggles with alcohol, drugs, men, the police and racism.
Parts of her story made me so sad, others angry. It is amazing that a person who had lived through so much could still find the strength to get on stage and sing like she did. It also partially explains how her voice was so full of feeling.
Until I read this, I had no idea about Billie Holiday as a person. I just knew the voice, that she had died relatively young, and the era she lived in would've made it difficult to be a beautiful talented black woman. This has really opened my eyes, and made me appreciate her talent even more.
Absolutely gorgeous to look at, really well told, I absolutely loved it.

I was really interested in seeing an artistic/graphic depiction of Billie Holiday’s life. I’m not sure if that’s what I go with this book. Yes, the visuals were very graphic and I liked the juxtaposition with the narrative moving between Billie Holiday and the reporter reporting on the 30th anniversary of her death, but outside of that the story seemed to me to be lacking. There wasn’t enough being said about the type of person Billie Holiday was and more spent on the image of Billie Holiday as a drug addict, whore. The images were interesting but they weren’t enough to carry this story on its own. If I had known nothing of Billie Holiday, this book would not have informed me of her life story. My view of her would be tainted with drug abuse, prostitution and an untimely death. There is much more to Billie Holiday’s story than that.

'Billie Holiday' by Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz is a graphic novel about the famous jazz singer. She didn't have a picturesque life, and this book doesn't flinch from that.

The book begins with an essay by Francis Marmande, a writer and journalist for Le Monde. The graphic novel has a framing story of a journalist doing a story on the 30th anniversary of Billie's death. What follows is not a complete story of her life, and it's certainly not a happy one. Billie had her own problems with drugs and men, and those are presented in an unflinching way. She was also discriminated against and faced racism in spite of her tremendous fame.

The book is drawn in stark black and white. The figures come across as caricatures with garishly drawn features. The incidents here are ugly and don't serve to put Billie Holiday in the best light. She had a hard life, and this book doesn't make any excuses for that. I appreciated the approach this graphic novel took.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Papercutz, NBM Publishing, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

A great biographical-graphic novel about Billie Holiday. With a strong art style.

Not my thing - beyond the plain text pieces, it's more a biography of a biographer, and the artwork is so messy and ugly you just can't tell who's who.

The first thing you should know about Billie Holiday, is , that although she was famous, she was black, and a woman, and those were two things that were hard in the 20th century.

And this graphic novel hits on all the depressing bits of her life. From her love life, to her drugs, to her tragic death. There are no bright spots, or very few.

This is a depressing look at a depressing life.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review