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In the first couple pages of this graphic novel, you see protagonist Rose reading a perfectly depicted, almost parodic page of a shoujo manga. It's a perfect moment -- a casual snapshot in the summer vacation of a young teenage girl, and at the same time, a nod to all the themes that go through the book (performativity, the male gaze -- or the female gaze, desire, what it means to be a girl).
Rose is up at Awago Beach with her family -- I guess one of the lakes in rural Ontario, which made this a rather intense read for me as somebody who's spent weeks and weekends in summer at the lakes and rivers of rural Ontario! She's hanging out with her friend Windy, who's a year and a half younger than her, enough that they're both starting to feel the age difference pretty keenly as the pressures of dating and sex start to hang over them. They hang out at the general store, and Rose is intrigued by Duncan, who has a girlfriend. Is it a crush? Maybe -- or just that he's a window into the mysteries of being a little bit older, old enough for drinking and sex.
Meanwhile, things are tense between Rose's parents; her mother is cold and moody. How can you draw an uncomfortable silence? How can you draw bristling at someone's touch? But Jillian Tamaki does. It's a brilliant thing to behold.
There are the pleasures of swimming and smores, claw machines, picking up rocks, riding bicycles, snooping on the neighbors. There's the complicated pleasure of one of the graphic novel's big conceits, as Windy and Rose rent a string of horror movies -- Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Friday the 13th. Terrifying or fun, something you enjoy for their own sake or because you think they're something you're supposed to enjoy? A badge to prove your own bravery and adulthood by?
It's a complicated, rough-edged story of friendship, and also of how you try to navigate being a girl, woman, or mother in a patriarchal world -- what it means to start growing into some consciousness of your place in that world.
It's so good. Really, really good. It's maybe the first YA fiction book this year that I would completely go to bat for if I were on the actual Printz committee.
Rose is up at Awago Beach with her family -- I guess one of the lakes in rural Ontario, which made this a rather intense read for me as somebody who's spent weeks and weekends in summer at the lakes and rivers of rural Ontario! She's hanging out with her friend Windy, who's a year and a half younger than her, enough that they're both starting to feel the age difference pretty keenly as the pressures of dating and sex start to hang over them. They hang out at the general store, and Rose is intrigued by Duncan, who has a girlfriend. Is it a crush? Maybe -- or just that he's a window into the mysteries of being a little bit older, old enough for drinking and sex.
Meanwhile, things are tense between Rose's parents; her mother is cold and moody. How can you draw an uncomfortable silence? How can you draw bristling at someone's touch? But Jillian Tamaki does. It's a brilliant thing to behold.
There are the pleasures of swimming and smores, claw machines, picking up rocks, riding bicycles, snooping on the neighbors. There's the complicated pleasure of one of the graphic novel's big conceits, as Windy and Rose rent a string of horror movies -- Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Friday the 13th. Terrifying or fun, something you enjoy for their own sake or because you think they're something you're supposed to enjoy? A badge to prove your own bravery and adulthood by?
It's a complicated, rough-edged story of friendship, and also of how you try to navigate being a girl, woman, or mother in a patriarchal world -- what it means to start growing into some consciousness of your place in that world.
It's so good. Really, really good. It's maybe the first YA fiction book this year that I would completely go to bat for if I were on the actual Printz committee.