Funny, startling, and sometimes unflattering.
Satrapi’s continuing memoir is just as good if not better than the first Persepolis. Using a black and white comic strip format, she continues where her story left off, having fled her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution for the freedom of Vienna where she attended high school. After four years of turbulent adolescence, she returns to Iran where she adjusts to life under the veil, pursues her artistic education and embarks on an unhappy marriage.
In Persepolis 2, Satrapi lays bare her life during this difficult and defining time. As an Iranian in Vienna she’s an outsider trying to understand herself and how she fits in. Back home in Iran, her Westernization makes her an outsider as well. Her independent mind, while encouraged by her parents, clashes with those in authority. As an artist and a woman, she finds life in Iran oppressive, and leaves her country a second time, this time much happier and more at peace with herself, to make a better life for herself.
Her imagery and words effectively convey the story, painting a broad picture of what it’s like to have grown up in Iran in recent history through details in her own life that are interesting, enlightening, funny, startling, sometimes unflattering, and cleverly told. [*****]
2 Things @ Once 
Just finished reading both of these remarkable books–I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to learn something about Iran apart from what we hear in the news.