In Cathy Malkasians' follow-up to 2007's award-winning graphic novel Percy Gloom, Temperance , Lester has no memory of his prior lifeafter a brutal injury in battle. For the next thirty years his wife doeseverything to keep him from remembering -and re-constructing- a society,Blessedbowl, that elevates him as a hero. Blessedbowl is a cultural convergenceof lies, memories, stories, and beliefs. Its people thrive on ideas ofpersecution, exceptionality, and enemies, convinced that war lurks just outsidetheir walls. They have come to depend on Lester, their greatest war hero, tolead the charge once the Final Battle begins. What kind of enemy could topplesuch a people and its walls? Mere memory, it seems, as Lester gradually emergesfrom his amnesia. Temperance is an eyewitness's account of recovery andawakening. Malkasian creates a fully realized, multi-layered world, inhabited byvividly realized characters. The graphic novel works on two levels. It considersthe concepts of violence, stories, and belief, and their place in holding aculture together, slyly echoing contemporary political issues in a nation at astressful time currently at war with a ubiquitous enemy.
