marriage between the story amp the graphics are a beautiful relationship!!!
You couldn't have the graphics without the story, and you couldn't have this story without the graphics.
The story is bittersweet, powerful, charming, and sad, . a coming of age young adult gorgeous graphic, . . dealing with real issues. Two young girls are dealing with their own set of problems while adults in their lives are also struggling.
Lots of details hidden in the graphics, . truthful expressions built into the characters faces, Great expressionaction moves, too, . like swimming for example.
Rose is a little older than Windy, but they have been hanging out together every summer during family beach vacations, This year, Rose's parents are fighting a lot,
creating tension for everyone in the family,
Also with Rose being, and Windy being, their age difference is showing up more this summer than in past years, 'Boys' . . is always the it that can come between girls friendships while growing up,
The age range isto, .
There's an awful lot of sex and swearing, so, if I were a parent of ayearold, I would hesitate having my daughter read this at age.
Byor, I think the book would be fine, Point is it's for more mature teens in my opinion,
As for me . . I thought the writing and visuals were both wonderful! I enjoyed my
one sitting read, This is another one of those "SUCH A BEAUTIFUL BOOK TO TOUCH"!!!!
Artwork:stars
Plot:stars
The artwork was STUNNING in this book but that's where my love ends.
I felt this could have told a bigger story and made a bigger impact but it felt very open ended honestly.
I did resonate with the mother so very much you'll know once you read the book
But I wanted more plot, more depth.
The artwork though A This book is so incredibly, wonderfully beautiful that it almost hurts me to give it two.
The art is all but perfect, with exactly the right level of detail, The individual characters are drawn as exactly that, individuals, and I never doubted who I was looking at, The expressions are also very clear, Best of all, the art is reproduced in the same lovely, smokey shade of blue as on the cover.
If this had been a wordless book, I think I would have been perfectly happy,
But it's not, The biggest problem, for me, was that I simply couldn't stand the main character, Rose, She's often mean and judgmental, and she's just unpleasant to spend time with, She spends much of the summer furiously angry towards an older girl, gleefully labeling her a slut every chance she gets.
Why Because the clerk at the gas station, an older boy Rose has a crush on, got her pregnant and now wants to avoid responsibility.
Now, it's very clear that the book isn't condoning Rose's slut shaming, but that doesn't make it any easier to read.
She's also terrible to her mother, who's obviously experiencing some form of depression, It's true that her mother doesn't communicate with Rose what's going on with her or why, but Rose doesn't seem to have the least bit of sympathy for her anyways.
She isn't even a terribly good friend to Windy, her lakeside friend since they were little, Most of the time, she seems bored by her,
It might have helped if there'd been more of a plot, It's just Rose being hateful towards a girl she doesn't even know, Rose being terrible towards her mother, and Rose being a subpar friend.
Yes, it's a very pretty book, but it's only worth looking at, not reading,: Reread with summer class on YA Comics and Graphic Novels with Kickass Main Characters, and loved it again, and the classthose that have finished it, ahemsay they love it.
A coming of age story that focuses on ONE summer and on girls and women and their relationships with in the focus of this story, at least with men.
Girlsandon the cusp of being teens teens, teenaged pregnancy adults with kids who are trying to have more kids.
A classic.
Reread with a small group of students focused on coming of age stories, So good.
Reread update, after reading it with my YA Comics/Graphic Novels class this summer, The way all great novels can be, better each time you read it, and it is always a privilege to experience reading with others who also like/love it, especially for me people who have never read anything like it before.
Most of them have never read graphic novels, So many small details, the mundane, become important, Was choked up speaking with the class of the resolution, Alice, the mother, in the water, saving another, saving herself.
Update, fourth reading: This is better and better every time I read it, and reading it with others always increases my love for it, too.
I'd just read this for a summer class in July, but I connected it this fall with Ghost
World and Black Hole because they all deal with teen girls' explorations/struggles with becoming sexually active.
The class, mostly women, were really engaged with this book, They really seemed to get into the subtleties of the text, the fact that the images carry most of the weight of the story, minimal gestures and facial expressions, and not much talking.
An emotional center.
I'll leave the July review intact, but just add here something I don't discuss below in my review, that watera lake where they go for two weeks every summerfigures in mightily in this story.
It's the central image and emotional site of the story, As we know, swimming can be a joyous summer experience, and it can also be dangerous, And we have no real idea through most of the book why it is such an anguished site for Alice, the mother.
Or why that changes for Alice in one dramatic moment,
/original review: This One Summer is the collaboration of two cousins, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, who work seamlessly on their story of a summer at a cottage on Lake Huron focused on "woman/girls in peril" as observed by girls "in transition" between tweenage and teenage, the very cusp of womanhood.
More accurately, it is focused on Rose, at, who hangs withyear old Windy every summer, This summer is different, though, in thatRose's mother is depressed and fighting with her husband she wants more children, but spoiler alert, sorry: she had a miscarriageRose has begun to register an interest in boys, particularly a guy named Dunc Windy calls him Dud who seems to be the summer crush at this little resort area, andthey watch a lot of horror movies, which, as you know, feature usually girls being pursued by dark mysterious principally male forces and sometimes slashed.
Dunc also seems to have impregnated one of the local girls, Jenny Jenny is one of the girls in the area referred to casually by the boys as "sluts," though all of the teens seem to party together.
So this is a book about what it means to be growing up female, an early comingofage book.
The cusp of it all, after the innocence of so many fun, carefree summers, The darker adult world looms for Rose, as she and Windy all summer sift through artifacts of the local teen/grownup lifeempties, cigarettesthe detritus of the teen party scene, and they overhear rude/profane conversations about sex.
Through this inquiry they come to understand what it means to be a teenaged girl and how boys fit into this scenario.
Danger ahead, sure, and yet desire looms, regardless,
Talk of sex is everywhere in This One Summer, Windy asks if Rose has a boyfriend, resents her crush on Dunc, Rose resents her mother's pursuit of more babies, though Rose thinks she would like one herself, maybe, at some point, with daydream twelveyearold fantasy Dunc or someone like him.
She reads comics and books with romance in them, Desire/crush begins to quietly consume her and Windy resents it, Windy is not ready for any of these considerations herself, She's ten,she wants summer with her friend to last forever! She mostly just wants to swim and dance and dig holes in the sand with Rose.
A lot of people love this for Jillian Tamaki's art especially and I agree, Her art is even more amazing here than on their previous project, Skim, which I also loved, Many people seem to hate this for a lack of narrative, that little happens, but I disagree with that, as so so much happens "this one summer," multiple interpersonal crises, and so much more that is happening is reflected in the visuals, in the inviting/foreboding lavender/purple/indigo coloration, the deftly subtle facial expression, the spoton dialogue.
It's in my opinion very spare and subtle, very sliceoflife as it gives you the sense of what it may be like for girls in the transition between childhood and teens.
Most importantly, it takes advantage of the comics medium, A small gesture, a wince, a tear, Subtle representations in word and image, Not much happens, in a sense, not much gets resolved, but really, everything happens,
The most important things happen in this novel in response to these crises in very small waysa hug or not, a word expressed or not.
A smirk, a small smile, It is great patient and spare storytelling deliberately getting at small moments of summer crush, and pregnant girl dilemma and mom and dad dilemma.
And friendship pressures.
This is my third time reading it, and this time I was actually quite moved by it.
Maybe it's having a daughter, Maybe it's reading all the literary/visual parallelism, the beauty of that, This book is such a tween book, in a way, and evidence for that is that it was a Caldecott Honor Book for children! and such a teen book, too, and evidence for that is that it is also a Printz Honor Book for teens!, and yay, a graphic novel, a beautiful collaboration between cousins.
This is a book maybe designed especially to speak to girls and women, and I love it, And I have to say the men in my class this summer also seemed to especially appreciate it, Yay for all that. .