Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship

Honoria, the daughter of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who invented the literary “summer on the Riviera” in the 1920s, is used to her parents' endless parties with such luminaries as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, at their splendid house at Cap d’Antibes. When sheltered and unsophisticated Ida visits for a summer, Honoria becomes both her mentor and tormentor, as well as her role model and, finally, her friend.

Shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award

When Ida is sent away for the summer to stay with the Murphys — friends of her father, but also of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald — she travels from New York to France and, unknowingly, into the artistic epicenter of 1929. There, she meets their haughty, sullen, and precocious daughter, Honoria, and wonders if she can be friends with the prettiest girl in the whole world. In the “perfect inverted world” of adults, one of constant play and leisure — and inebriation, of course — it’s the children who most acutely perceive the pervasive unhappiness bubbling beneath the surface gaiety.

Achingly sad and effortlessly funny, full of the kind of youthful sincerity unclouded by pretenses of age, short story writer and cartoonist Janice Shapiro’s debut graphic novel, Honoria, is the complex story of the education of two young girls who have started moving slowly into womanhood.

Black-and-white illustrations throughout