A likable journey that is sensitive to the triumphs and agonies of being a 13-year-old girl.
Shannon just wants to get through eighth grade in one piece—while feeling like her own worst enemy.
In this third entry in popular author for young people Hale’s graphic memoir series, the young, sensitive overachiever is crushed by expectations: to be cool but loyal to her tightknit and dramatic friend group, a top student but not a nerd, attractive to boys but true to her ideals. As events in Shannon’s life begin to overwhelm her, she works toward finding a way to love and understand herself, follow her passions for theater and writing, and ignore her cruel inner voice. Capturing the visceral embarrassments of middle school in 1987 Salt Lake City, Shannon’s emotions are vivid and often excruciating. In particular, the social norms of a church-oriented family are clearly addressed, and religion is shown as being both a comfort and a struggle for Shannon. While the text is sometimes in danger of spelling things out a little too neatly and obviously, the emotional honesty and sincerity drawn from Hale’s own life win out. Pham’s artwork is vibrant and appealing, with stylistic changes for Shannon’s imaginings and the leeching out of color and use of creative panel structures as her anxiety and depression worsen.
A likable journey that is sensitive to the triumphs and agonies of being a 13-year-old girl. (author's note, gallery) (Graphic memoir. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-31755-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A rich and deeply felt slice of life.
Crafting fantasy worlds offers a budding middle school author relief and distraction from the real one in this graphic memoir debut.
Everyone in Tori’s life shows realistic mixes of vulnerability and self-knowledge while, equally realistically, seeming to be making it up as they go. At least, as she shuttles between angrily divorced parents—dad becoming steadily harder to reach, overstressed mom spectacularly incapable of reading her offspring—or drifts through one wearingly dull class after another, she has both vivacious bestie Taylor Lee and, promisingly, new classmate Nick as well as the (all-girl) heroic fantasy, complete with portals, crystal amulets, and evil enchantments, taking shape in her mind and on paper. The flow of school projects, sleepovers, heart-to-heart conversations with Taylor, and like incidents (including a scene involving Tori’s older brother, who is having a rough adolescence, that could be seen as domestic violence) turns to a tide of change as eighth grade winds down and brings unwelcome revelations about friends. At least the story remains as solace and, at the close, a sense that there are still chapters to come in both worlds. Working in a simple, expressive cartoon style reminiscent of Raina Telgemeier’s, Sharp captures facial and body language with easy naturalism. Most people in the spacious, tidily arranged panels are White; Taylor appears East Asian, and there is diversity in background characters.
A rich and deeply felt slice of life. (afterword, design notes) (Graphic memoir. 10-13)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-53889-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s...
In the latest of his Hazardous Tales (One Dead Spy, 2012, etc.), Hale recaps World War I with an all-animal cast.
Any similarities to Art Spiegelman’s Maus are doubtless coincidental. Per established series formula, a frame tale finds the author’s more-renowned namesake holding off the hangman, Scheherazade-like, with tales from our country’s future history. In this volume, he covers the war’s prelude, precipitation, major campaigns and final winding down in small but reasonably easy-to-follow two-color panels. At the hangman’s request, narrator Hale both tucks in a few jokes and transforms the opposing armies into animal-headed soldiers—from Gallic roosters and British bulldogs to, as “eagle” was already taken by the Germans, American bunnies. Despite lightening the load in this manner and shying away from explicit brutality, Hale cogently conveys the mind-numbing scale of it all as well as the horrors of trench warfare. He presents with equal ease the strategic and tactical pictures, technological innovations from poison gas to tanks, and related developments such as the Russian Revolution. After the cease fire, which he attributes more to exhaustion than battlefield victory, he closes with a summary of the war’s human toll and geopolitical changes.
A neatly coherent account with tweaks that allow readers some emotional distance—but not enough to shrug off the war’s devastating cost and world-changing effects. (bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0808-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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