When I read La Perdida I had just gotten back from a trip to Guatemala, and it was easy to understand how someone might fall into a love affair with a Latin American country. Jessica Abel’s brilliant graphic novel is interested in exploring what happens when we let ourselves be swept off our feet by a place or situation and decide that no matter what, we will not pull away. Her beautifully observed illustrations capture wonder and danger with equal sensitivity.

La Perdida - which, as anyone with access to the miracle of Google translation tools can tell you, means “the lost one,” in Spanish - follows Carla, an itinerant, Frida Kahlo-obsessed twenty-something, through a year spent living in Mexico City. She shows up on the city’s doorstep without a plan and soon decides she can’t leave. From the first page, we’re drawn into her quest for authenticity and belonging, witnessing the conflict between her need to protect herself and her desire for an unfiltered experience. She has to learn many things quickly – Spanish being one of them.

Abel never lets Carla dodge the guilt and privilege that travel along with her, and isn’t afraid to let her be unsympathetic. To Carla, “tourist” is the worst thing a person can be called, and proving herself to be otherwise is a full time job. We know from the very start that it won’t end happily, but exactly how things will unravel is much less clear.

Turned off by the insular expatriate community, Carla vows to meet and befriend “real” Mexicans. Complicating her well-intentioned naïveté is Memo, to whom she is attracted both because of and in spite of his relentless stream of Communist dogma. He becomes one of her closest friends, though this doesn’t stop him from ruthlessly, and almost recreationally, fixating on her relative wealth and privilege. Carla is always on the defensive, pointing out the ways she is not like everyone else, outlining the steps she is taking to disown her American background. It doesn’t make a difference. “You don’t know what it is to be a conquistadora,” Memo tells her during one of their many clashes. “But here you are.”

Full of heated arguments and resonant wordless drawings, the story feels intimate despite its busy setting. Abel’s pen convincingly translates the textures and flavors of Mexico City to small panels and black ink. Her vivid, flawed characters change over the course of the story in ways that feel entirely believable. Carla’s boyfriend Oscar starts out sweet and harmless, but as her Spanish improves it becomes obvious that he is looking for an escape from the country she is eager to adopt as her own. When Carla’s brother comes to visit, she’s confused to find him slip into Mexican culture with an ease that is out of her reach. Memo is both her confessor and tormentor. Around them, the city swelters and seduces, and Carla ignores all manner of red flags in willing it to become her home.

This could be read as a cautionary tale, but Abel clearly has more in mind. In confronting the awkward baggage Americans drag around, she implicates her readers as well as her characters. This makes La Perdida more than a great book: it’s a brave one, too.