I find it hard to resist books about young women from small towns who move to the big city, a tendency I blame as much on personal experience as on Muriel Spark and her Girls of Slender Means. Arriving in London in my early 20s, I was often anxious, mostly about money. But the exhilaration I felt whenever I made my way to the top of a red doubledecker usually saw off any deeper fears pretty fast. Like Kay Sohini, whose new graphic memoir tells the story of how she swapped the suburbs of Kolkata for New York, London allowed me briefly to be “a character – a full-fledged, living, breathing manifestation of [an] impossible dream”.

Sohini developed a crush on New York at a young age, a passion born first of TV shows such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother, and later of books by Alison Bechdel, Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath. It seemed to her that the city was not only a muse to writers and other creative types. It was also “a fix for slightly broken people”, a phrase she would one day sadly have cause to apply to herself. At 24, having finally managed to leave a coercive relationship, Sohini found that she wanted only to get as far away from Kolkata as possible – and, naturally, New York, the city she had romanticised for so long, was the first and last destination she considered. In its anonymity and “white noise” she would surely be able to lose herself, half tourist and half PhD student (Stony Brook University on Long Island offered her a full scholarship).

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is in part a tribute to the place she feels saved her, and it works best when it’s on this territory, recounting Sohani’s endless walks across Manhattan. New York fortifies her, and watches over her, and slowly she uncovers its secrets, nurturing her own rituals (taking the aerial tram from Roosevelt Island to Trader Joe’s at Bridgemarket) and selecting her favourite sights (the huge, cursive signs that appear on Macy’s department stores at Christmas; the F-train notices that have Bengali translations; the Strand bookstore). Her illustrations of New York are so effective; I love the way she messes with scale, and mixes her media, deploying maps, Polaroid photographs and textbook diagrams when she needs to slow down the book’s sometimes exhausting pace.

When it goes elsewhere, however, it works less well. An author biography informs the reader that Sohini, who still lives in New York and now works as an illustrator, drew her doctoral dissertation as a comic – and her first book, with its accounts of India in the 1990s and the iniquities of housing in NYC, at moments has the feel of an essay, or even a lecture. She struggles slightly to combine words and pictures, preferring instead to dump big blocks of text on a page (speech bubbles, unless in the form of text messages, seem to be anathema to her).

But never mind. I read these sections quickly, if not exactly tolerantly, and luxuriated instead in Sohini’s postcards from the Big Apple: a street in Jackson Heights, rich with Indian restaurants; Gimbel’s stirring sky bridge in Midtown; swirling autumn leaves in Central Park. You feel the good these places did her, and with such an awareness comes the itch of wanderlust, the sudden desire spontaneously to book a flight.