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books

Tomboy by Liz Prince

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In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how I enjoy getting my nonfiction via graphic novel, and I read two spectacular ones over this past weekend. Coincidentally (or maybe not), they were both graphic memoirs about growing up as a girl in America.

Liz Prince’s Tomboy addresses this topic a bit more bluntly than Telgemeier’s Sisters does. Prince characterizes her identity as a tomboy as something she knew from almost the moment of birth, though she didn’t know how to articulate it right away. She hates wearing dresses, enjoys playing sports, doesn’t play with dolls, and looks down upon the “girly girls” who dress up like princesses and seem obsessed with makeup. The book takes Liz from her infancy up through her adolescence and into her later teen years, tackling friendship, bullying, dating, and other rites of passage. While it focuses primarily on Liz’s struggle with her gender identity, the book is also a story about family and art, much like Sisters is.

Liz’s preferred method of gender expression didn’t make things easy for her. While attending Catholic school, she was forced to wear a dress for monthly mass, and it was tortuous. She was teased a lot, called derogatory names, accused of being a boy or a lesbian (and these were definitely accusations from her tormentors), and never felt she fit in. She wanted so desperately to be “one of the boys,” but the boys wouldn’t ever allow it, and of course, she never felt like she fit in with the girls.

Savvy readers will pick up on the fact that Liz herself pigeonholes people, buying into the very system that she rails against. At one point, she reads about a girl in a magazine who describes herself as a tomboy, but this girl wears a pretty dress to go on a date with a boy, and Liz instantly decides this makes the girl not a real tomboy. Liz puts boys on a pedestal, believing their interests and values are more worthy of respect than girls’ interests and values, and this is part of what drives her desire to not be a girl.

Near the end of the book, Liz meets Harley, a woman who forces her to realize that she’s unwittingly become a part of the problem, too. She’s placed boys in one homogenous group and girls in another. Through Harley’s guidance (plus Harley’s encouragement of Liz’s artistic skills), Liz learns to see herself as a girl and embrace that identity, even if she doesn’t express that identity in traditional ways. This realization opens a door for Liz, allowing her to finally accept herself and settle into a personal identity that brings some happiness rather than discontent.

While both Sisters and Tomboy are about growing up as girls, they’re also about growing up as girls who like comics. These kinds of books are especially important for artistic girls who have a passion for these kinds of things that are often relegated to the field of “boys’ interests.” I can just imagine a pre-teen or teenager becoming inspired by Raina or Liz, seeing them struggle and emerge victorious. After all, the books are proof of the victory!

This should resonate with teens who struggle with gender non-conformity,
even in relatively minor ways, and get them to think more deeply
about the damage caused when we label people as one thing or another. Fitting in is the perennial topic for teens’ books, and for many, it’s a struggle that dominates their lives for years. Finding your place, your people, your passion is hard, especially when it seems everyone is out to stop you from doing it. Even those teens who express their gender in traditional ways usually have trouble fitting in elsewhere, and consequently, they should have no trouble relating in some way to Liz’s story.

Liz’s age through most of the book, the themes addressed, plus some minor swearing and drug use make this a memoir best suited for teens. When Liz finally finds her people near the end and is able to develop her passion for comics, it’s a gratifying moment. I think it’s a moment that happens to a lot of teens right around the time it happened to Liz. It gives the book a nice coming-of-age arc and provides satisfying closure. This is a stellar example of what the graphic format can do – it’s accessible, insightful, and fun to read. Highly recommended.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. Tomboy is available September 2.

Sisters by Raina Telgemeier

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I’ve found that I prefer my nonfiction in unconventional mediums – via audio, in short snippets on the web, or in graphic novel format. This past weekend, I dug into two stellar graphic memoirs, both of which tackled growing up as a girl in America: Sisters by Raina Telgemeier and Tomboy by Liz Prince. I planned to review both in this post, but because I love you, dear readers, I’ve split them into two posts (I got a little wordy, as often happens). Come back tomorrow for a discussion of Tomboy.

Sisters is a companion book to Smile and tells the story of a summer road trip taken by Raina, her little sister Amara, her little brother Will, and her mother. They drove from California to Colorado to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins when Raina was around 14. Interspersed among the events of the road trip are musings on Raina’s initial desire to have a little sister – and the reasons Raina felt this was a terrible mistake once it actually happened.

The book focuses mainly on Raina’s relationship with Amara, covering the road trip in a linear way and flashing back to various other moments in time: Amara’s birth, Amara as a toddler, Will’s birth, and so on. Every girl’s relationship with her sister is different, but they almost all share that lovely combination of love and intense dislike. Sometimes your sister will be your best friend; sometimes she’ll be your arch enemy. If you’re lucky, by the time you’re both adults, you’re solidly on the friend track most of the time. When you’re both kids, though, it’s an uneven, rocky trail.

Telgemeier rounds out the story with a few other elements: Raina’s relationship with her cousins (not great), her parents’ relationship with each other, her father being laid off, her interest in comics, and so on. There’s a great scene between Raina and her older male cousins where Raina expresses her interest in drawing comics, naming some of her favorite strips (For Better or for Worse, Foxtrot), and her cousins laugh it off as “not real comics” (like Batman or Hulk, according to them). This is such a simple and realistic way to address sexism in comics and how difficult finding and advocating for your passion can be when you’re a kid. I’ve no doubt that a conversation much like this actually happened.

As a child who went on numerous summer road trips with a brother and a little sister to visit cousins who weren’t always so nice to me, this was instantly relatable. It’s also funny. I laughed out loud at the story Telgemeier tells of her little sister’s pet snake getting loose in the van and living for days without dying or being caught (Raina is, of course, terrified of snakes, and Amara uses this against her). I have stories like this from my own family’s road trips, too. One of my parents’ favorite stories of sibling bickering on road trips involves one kid telling a parent about another kid: “Mom, she’s looking out my window!” (Apparently, we felt that we not only had our own seats in the minivan, we also had our own specific windows.) It’s funny now, but I know we were dead serious then.

Telgemeier has a magical way of making the mundane seem extraordinary. Nothing that happens is fantastical or unusual, but it’s riveting anyway. It should speak quite strongly to big sisters who look on their little sisters with equal parts fondness and aggravation (and vice versa!), bringing to light that contradictory fact that you can love someone and hate her at the same time. There are insights about love and kindness, sure, but it’s not saccharine and she never hits the reader over the head with a Message.

Telgemeier traffics in nostalgia for adults my age – there are references to battery-run Walkmans and a conspicuous absence of the internet or cell phones – but doesn’t allow the book to wallow in it. This is still a book for kids who are kids right now – kids who are forced into close proximity with their siblings who they may not have a lot in common with for a long period of time, whether that’s on a road trip or sharing a bedroom or enforced “family game nights.” It’s about how you get along (or don’t) with the people life has thrown at you through no fault of your own. It’s a lovely middle grade memoir about family with Telgemeier’s trademark expressive, cartoon-style art, and it should find a wide audience.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Sisters is available today.

The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang & Sonny Liew

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I don’t think Gene Yang has written a book yet that I haven’t liked. His latest, The Shadow Hero, is an ambitious project, one that should instantly establish itself as part of the comics canon. He’s taken an obscure character from the 1940s, possibly the first-ever Asian American superhero, and written an origin story for him that is fresh, timely, and fun.

The Green Turtle was a short-lived hero from the Golden Age of comics. His face was almost always obscured, which some argue was done in order to allow the creator to make him an Asian-American hero as opposed to the white American that the publisher wanted. Yang and Liew have pulled this character from the footnotes of comics history and made him into an interesting and fully-formed superhero, the son of Chinese immigrants experiencing his teenage years through the lenses of his heritage as well as his unconventional ability.

Like much of Yang’s other work, this is a story about growing up as a Chinese-American, but it also feels very much like a classic superhero story. Hank’s parents were both born in China and came to America separately, for different reasons. Hank’s mother felt like she settled for Hank’s father, and she doesn’t have the life she always dreamed of. This contributes to her desire to make something of her son, and she sets about trying to figure out a way for Hank to get real superpowers, much like the Anchor of Justice, a real superhero in this book’s world (set just before the second world war). Hank isn’t into it at first, but as you might expect, something eventually does happen and Hank becomes the Green Turtle.

Yang takes a lot of tropes (a nicer word for cliches in this case) from 40s comics and incorporates them into Hank’s story. The book includes things like a detective named Lawful, gangsters as villains, freak accidents that imbue people with powers, and so on. Rather than feeling lazy or derivative, these choices feel deliberate, especially when accompanied by a hero protagonist who is pointedly Chinese-American as his inspiration was never allowed to be. The book feels like a homage to Chu Hing (the creator of the Green Turtle from the 40s) as well as a corrective – in a small way – to decades of comics history that never allowed stories like these featuring characters like Hank and his family to be told.

The book also functions really well as a straight-up superhero comic, no context needed to enjoy it. The story is interesting, the art is crisp and expressive, the characters are nicely rounded. The plot also has some unique mythology behind it, tying it back to Hank’s heritage, lending Hank and his nemesis extra depth and adding some much-needed layers to the story.

I love superhero origin stories featuring teenagers; they’re such perfect metaphors for the teenage experience. I see this as a great readalike for fans of the new Ms. Marvel, someone who is also struggling to grow up as part of a cultural minority in America while simultaneously grappling with new abilities that are both amazing and terrifying.

The author’s note at the end gives context on the original comic and reproduces an issue in full. It’s a must-read, enhancing the significance of Yang and Liew’s own work. Highly recommended.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. The Shadow Hero is available now (so no excuses).

Graphic Novel Roundup

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The Return of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke
We return to outer space for this final installment in Hatke’s trilogy about Zita and her adventures on alien planets. Zita has been captured by an evildoer masquerading as an arbiter of justice and put on trial for her “crimes” from the previous two novels. Old friends return to help her escape, of course, and further adventures ensue. Hatke excels at creating truly oddball characters (aliens and robots and strange humans, too), throwing them all together, and letting them develop authentic and fun relationships with each other. The art is lovely as always and the end of the story is poignant and encourages further imagination from the book’s young readers.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. The Return of Zita the Spacegirl is available now.

Andre the Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown
Brown gives a nuanced portrait of the WWF wrestler and actor from The Princess Bride. I knew practically nothing about him going into this other than the fact that he wrestled and acted in the movie; I learned a lot while reading the book. Andre comes across as complex and not always likeable, but that’s as it should be. Brown has used multiple sources for this biography, all of which he lists in easy to read format at the end. I rarely read source notes, but these were almost as interesting as the biography itself – they reveal just how much of the book was based on others’ perceptions of Andre and how much of it was based on Andre’s own words and actions. Most of the book focuses on Andre’s wrestling and very little of it on The Princess Bride, so fans of the movie may be disappointed. Adult and older teen readers looking for an absorbing graphic biography should find plenty to like here, though.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Andre the Giant: Life and Legend is available now.

Cleopatra in Space #1: Target Practice by Mike Maihack
This book is exactly what it says: the most famous Cleopatra finds a tablet as a teenager and it sends her into space far, far in the future. She lands at a space school where she learns how to fight as well as more mundane things like algebra. She also learns she’s prophesied to defeat a great villain. This is a super fun, full-color graphic novel that smooshes together a lot of high appeal factors: ancient Egypt, space, time travel, a girl protagonist who can fight. It’s got a lot of terrific little details: the school is run by cats, a fun nod to the ancient Egyptian reverence of these animals, and Cleopatra’s future transportation apparatus is a bike that looks like the sphinx. While Cleopatra is 15 here, the book is best suited (and appropriate) for tween readers. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for subsequent volumes.

Review copy picked up at TLA. Cleopatra in Space #1: Target Practice is available now.

Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust by Loic Dauvillier
Dauvillier’s graphic novel about the Holocaust – a fictional account, not based on any one particular person – shows that it is possible to successfully address horrifying historical events with young children without traumatizing them. One night, a young child comes across her grandmother and notices she is feeling very sad. The grandmother opens up to her granddaughter and shares the story of her childhood in World War II Paris. As a child, Dounia experienced what it was like to first wear the Jewish star, then be separated from her parents and being hidden by various friends and neighbors as violence against Jewish people in France escalated. It’s told in a gentle way, with a focus on universal feelings that both Dounia in the 1940s and her granddaughter in the present day could share. The art is child-friendly and expertly conveys the emotions being expressed. A challenging venture, but well executed.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust is available now.

Ariol #4: A Beautiful Cow by Emmanuel Guibert
The Ariol books are collections of slice-of-life vignettes that feature a large group of anthropomorphized animals representing kids about 8-10 years old. Ariol is a donkey who has a crush on a cow named Petula (the cow of the title), but not many of the stories actually involve Petula. Several of them are school stories. One involves a group of the kids/animals thinking they’ve come down with fleas – but is it just a ploy to get out of class? Another features Ariol and his friend visiting his grandparents; another is about school picture day. The vignettes (drawn with slightly cartoonish, but not exaggerated, illustrations) are relatable to kids with understated, authentic humor. I liked that the kids don’t always act very nicely – and that the not-so-nice behavior isn’t always followed up with a lecture from the parents on how to act nicer. Guibert shows kids as they are – you know, if they were animals and not people. There’s also some dry humor that adults will enjoy. A pleasant, low-key success.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. Ariol #4: A Beautiful Cow is available now.

This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

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Before talking about This One Summer‘s story, I think it’s obvious from the cover alone that the art is what stands out. This isn’t a full-colored graphic novel, nor is it rendered only in black and white. It’s done entirely in blue ink on a cream, rather than stark white, background.

The choices made in color and art set a tone that’s both nostalgic and present. This book feels like it’s happening in the moment, but it also feels slightly removed, slightly different because it’s in a moment between the comforts of the past and the changes coming in the future.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki are the cousin team behind This One Summer, a graphic novel that could easily be categorized on the more literary end of graphic novels, if such a designation exists (I think it does). Every summer, Rose and her parents go to a lake house they own on Awago Beach. It’s an opportunity for all of them to unwind after a long, hard year.

Every year, Rose looks forward to the trip, as it’s an opportunity to spend every waking moment doing exactly what it is she wants to do. She loves reuniting with Windy, a girl who is a little younger than her but who seems almost like the little sister that Rose never had. Both girls are young — Rose barely a teenager and Windy even younger than her — but it’s because of their being on the young end of the spectrum that the story unfolds as being about what it means to transition from a place of innocence and naivety to one of knowing that the world isn’t all summer vacations at the beach house.

The relationship between Windy and Rose was easily the most interesting element of the story for me. Rose is much more mature than Windy is, but Windy is much more adventurous. Rose is definitely more self-conscious than Windy is, who has no shame nor reason to be shamed for how she chooses to dress, how she chooses to dance, and how she chooses to express herself. She’s not worried about the impression she leaves; Rose, on the other hand, is definitely more aware of how other people perceive her and is more tucked in because of that.

From the start of the vacation, things aren’t great at Rose’s place. Her mom and dad are constantly fighting. Rose seeks a lot of solace in spending time with Windy to get away from it. The two of them, being on the cusp of huge changes, find themselves intrigued by those who live in Awago Beach year-round and who have lives that look so different than the ones they’re used to.

It’s interesting to see the lives of the year round residents contrasted against the girls there for the summer. One of the biggest emerging themes in the story is that of sexuality — both Windy and Rose are on the verge of discovering their own sexuality, and Windy in particular finds herself fascinated with other people’s choices when it comes to expressing their desire (she mentions, as seen in the page on the right, that her aunt is a lesbian, and this is a theme that comes up more than once in the story). The summer is representative of the girls discovering what it is that the year round teens have found to be both exciting and hugely complicated and troublesome: sex.

Roe and Windy are at the point where it’s easiest to make judgments and comments about sex than to really understand the complexity of it. Girls can be put into categories — slutty or not — without much thought as to what that sort of labeling may mean nor how those labels became so easy to use. They’re not aware of how much they’ve picked up and absorbed from the world around them, and they’re unaware of their own voices or points of view.

What’s “in the moment” for Rose and Windy is the reality of the year round teens. They’re on the verge of discovery, and it’s exciting. Their curiosity is piqued and they pursue it, to the point of meddling perhaps a little too much into the lives of the teens who they don’t know. Those teens, on the other hand, are well into their adolescence and are grappling now not with the excitement nor point of discovery; they’re working through the consequences of the decisions they’ve made.

I haven’t touched too much on the story of Rose’s family, but it parallels the changes going on in Rose’s life well. The dynamics of their family are shifting because Rose’s mother is facing serious questions about what she’s doing with her own life and what is to come for her. Rather than adulthood being depicted as an endpoint in This One Summer, it’s instead a continuum that’s regularly shifting. While adolescence is a tumultuous period of time, so, too, is adulthood. Even when everything seems like it’s stable and people have everything figured out, that’s not the truth. There are always hurdles that pop up, and there are changes which pop up that are positive and that are terrifying, even for the most “together” adults.

At times, the book felt a little too conscious of what it was doing. Perhaps because I’m reading it as an adult who gets what strings are being pulled — this is a book about having one’s illusions and beliefs and security rattled and shattered — I didn’t feel like Rose nor Windy got to do enough of the doing in the story, as much as the story did more of the doing for them. Fortunately, because I enjoyed the story and the art especially, this didn’t kill the book for me. I saw the hand, but I was able to ignore it enough to still enjoy.

This One Summer is about growing up and about all of the variations of “growing up” exist. It’s about being on the verge of discovery and having the safety and comfort of childhood rattled by the reality of a world beyond the bubble. It’s about coming to understand that what you thought you knew and understood aren’t the things you might actually know or understand. This is a book that has appeal for teen readers, but I think this is a graphic novel that adult readers might walk away from with more, simply because there’s a level of appreciating that moment teens may or may not have yet experienced.

Review copy received from the publisher. This One Summer is available now.