Miss Remarkable and Her Career

By Joanna Rubin Dranger

In a world where what you do defines who you are, Miss Remarkable is having a hard time finding her way. Starting out with goals that are impssibly high, she despairs that nothing she does is ever good enough. We follow her as she vainly seeks guidance from dubious friends, demanding parents and well-meaning boyfriends, eventually realising that only by listening to herself will she find real happiness. Dranger's vivd line drawings provide brilliant and hilarious visual metaphors for the kind of anxious uncertainty that plagues overachievers everywhere.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014200300X
• ISBN13: 9780142003008
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.6" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Dark Horse

Think of the heroine of the darkly comic, new graphic novel Miss Remarkable & Her Career as the anti-Bridget Jones. While Ms. Jones drowns her sorrows in pints of ice cream and pithy diary entries, Miss Remarkable struggles with the somewhat less chick-lit friendly topics of real depression, crushing parental expectations, and career meltdown. A runaway bestseller in Europe (where they like their humor black, hold the sugar) Miss Remarkable is sure to find a niche audience among cynics and optimists nationwide. Swedish author and illustrator Joanna Rubin Dranger's frank, witty text will hit a chord a minute with anyone who's ever had a moment of self-doubt, and her expressive, elastic visuals will make you feel like you're watching an animated film rather than reading.

Dranger hit the nail on the head!

At first, when I saw this book and started flipping through it, I thought, "eh, it's a bunch of cartoons about work." But then I started to look more closely, and I realized that, far from being disjointed and unrelated cartoons, it was the story of a woman who was taught in early childhood that without success and achievements, she was nobody and that was the worst thing imaginable. It was the story of the stress and pressure she put on herself to be perfect, to excel and always be better and the resulting feelings of inadequacy and having disappointed others in her life that ultimately lead to her desperate attempts to "find herself." As someone who has been through this kind of "Why hasn't my life turned out the way it was supposed to be," kind of struggle, I found that Dranger's characterizations, depictions, and choice of words resonated deep within me- she captured every nuance of what it feels like to not know what to do with your life- to feel like a failure and to know that everyone in your life thinks you're a total loser. I loved this book and how much of "me" it described. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever had a time of uncertainty about the direction of their lives or careers.