Wednesday, April 30th at 7:30pm, we’re pleased to present a book release party for short story writer & cartoonist Janice Shapiro with her debut graphic novel fresh out from Fantagraphics, Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship. That’s young Honoria at the far right, with her siblings and her mother, Sara Murphy, who, together which her husband Gerald Murphy, were at the center of a constellation of gadflies flitting about them and their guests at the Murphys’ Cap d’Antibes villa — guests that included their good friends Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, not to mention the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter and Pablo Picasso, reveling through the nights and languishing in the sun on the beach by day.

It’s the summer of 1929, when Ida, a young, sheltered and unsophisticated girl from New York, is sent by her father to stay with Honoria and her parents, the Murphys, at their villa on the Mediterranean coast of France.

For Ida, Honoria becomes both mentor and tormentor, as well as her role model and, finally, her friend. Achingly sad and effortlessly funny, full of the kind of youthful sincerity that is unclouded by pretenses of age, Honoria is the complex story of the education of two young girls who have started moving slowly into womanhood. In the “perfect inverted world” of adults, one of constant play, leisure and inebriation, it’s the children who most acutely perceive the pervasive unhappiness bubbling beneath the surface gaiety.