A finely executed, wonderfully evocative tale of teen discovery.
A graphic novel takes the form of a teenage doodler’s diary in 1987.
Nick Pope’s family just moved across town, meaning he’s starting his sophomore year at a new high school with new classmates. So far, it isn’t going well. Nick has two purple birthmarks around his eyes, so he always looks as if he’s just been punched in the face. His new classmates call him Raccoon. At home, he has no one to talk to. His older sister, April, is away at college. His sixth-grader brother, Jamie, has already kissed a girl (something Nick has never done). Then Nick starts to make some friends. There’s Preston, a music lover who always wears the denim jacket that belonged to his dead brother. There’s also Sharita, the pregnant girl he meets in study hall. Plus, there’s Coach Pierson, his accounting teacher who seems to pay him special attention, though Nick doesn’t know how he feels about it. Nick wants to be an artist and, with Preston’s encouragement, he is selected for a committee of six students to paint a mural downtown. But just as Nick begins to feel as if he’s found a place for himself, he learns there are downsides to any sort of relationship. Especially in high school, where things start to get very adult very quickly. Stanton’s writing perfectly captures Nick’s angsty teenage insecurity. Here he describes a missed connection with a pretty girl at a mall: “I felt the back of my neck get all prickly” and then “she turned and looked at me. She glanced at me like I was a dead mouse. That’s how a lot of people look at me. I smiled at her like I practice in the mirror. I pictured us on the dance floor together and a Billy Joel song playing…Then she walked past and it was all over.” Just as compelling are the black-and-white illustrations by Darling, who died in 2018. They delightfully replicate the drawings a creative loner would make in his journal. By turns gritty and sweet, the book deftly captures the confusion of adolescence.
A finely executed, wonderfully evocative tale of teen discovery.Pub Date: May 5, 2023
ISBN: 979-8393139346
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fast-paced dip into the possibility of a world without human emotions.
A teenage girl refuses a medical procedure to remove her heart and her emotions.
June lives in a future in which a reclusive Scientist has pioneered a procedure to remove hearts, thus eliminating all “sadness, anxiety, and anger.” The downside is that it numbs pleasurable feelings, too. Most people around June have had the procedure done; for young people, in part because doing so helps them become more focused and successful. Before long, June is the only one among her peers who still has her heart. When her parents decide it’s time for her to have the procedure so she can become more focused in school, June hatches a plan to pretend to go through with it. She also investigates a way to restore her beloved sister’s heart, joining forces with Max, a classmate who’s also researching the Scientist because he has started to feel again despite having had his heart removed. The pair’s journey is somewhat rushed and improbable, as is the resolution they achieve. However, the story’s message feels relevant and relatable to teens, and the artwork effectively sets the scene, with bursts of color popping throughout an otherwise black-and-white landscape, reflecting the monochromatic, heartless reality of June’s world. There are no ethnic or cultural markers in the text; June has paper-white skin and dark hair, and Max has dark skin and curly black hair.
A fast-paced dip into the possibility of a world without human emotions. (Graphic speculative fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780063116214
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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