THE YEAR MY LIFE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A teenager wrestles with complicated feelings, family secrets, and deep frustration in this title translated from French.

When 14-year-old Franny’s widower father, a hobbyist inventor, gets the chance to travel to Kyoto to participate in a contest, she’s uprooted from Montreal to the “suburban hellscape” of St. Lorette to live with maternal relatives she never knew she had. To say that Franny resists is an understatement. Ruefully acknowledging that she has “a knack for acting first and thinking…later,” Franny navigates her transition with one instance of self-sabotage after another. But she eventually overcomes her aversion to new classmate Leona’s dorkiness to make friends and warms up to her aunt Lorette’s stepson, Henry. The three kids buckle down together to solve the mysteries surrounding Franny’s mother’s death. Franny chronicles the events (which span a few months rather than a year) in her diary, the extremely busy design of which involves color-coded dialogue, faux-handwritten annotations, and occasional sketches, courtesy of Ferrer. The illustrations suggest an all-white cast. It isn’t at all convincing as a simulacrum of a diary, but there’s no denying it’s eye-catching. Boulanger’s translation from French is mostly smooth; in it, Franny’s voice is abrasive and frequently includes ableist language, but amid the anger and hurt gleam piercing, often beautiful insights: “Adults are like that. They shape the truth like modeling clay, until things are marginally bearable.” It’s in moments like these that Franny shines.

Shrewd, empathetic observations distinguish this Québecois import.