NICK POPE

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.