From the Harvey and Lulu award-winning creator of Artbabe comes this
riveting story of a young woman's misadventures in Mexico City. Carla,
an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to
"find herself." She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been
drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his
heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good--humored
about Carla's reappearance on his doorstep--until he realizes that
Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo's
house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving.
When Harry and Carla's relationship of mutual tolerance reaches its
inevitable end, she rejects his world of Anglo expats for her own set of
friends: pretty-boy Oscar, who sells pot and dreams of being a DJ, and
charismatic Memo, a left-wing, pseudo-intellectual ladies' man.
Determined to experience the real Mexico, Carla turns a blind eye to her
new friends' inconsistencies. But then she catches the eye of a drug
don, el Gordo, and from that moment on her life gets a lot more
complicated, and she is forced to confront the irreparable consequences
of her willful innocence.
Jessica Abel's evocative black-and-white drawings and creative mix of
English and Spanish bring Mexico City's past and present to life,
unfurling Carla's dark history against the legacies of Burroughs and
Kahlo. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and
the consequences of trusting easy answers, La Perdida-at once grounded
in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal-is a story
about finding oneself by getting lost.
