Skip to main content

Review 6: This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

This One Summer
Coming-of-age stories are really hard to get right. You have to walk a line of being nostalgic without being indulgent; sincere without being mawkish; funny without being twee. This One Summer pulls this off really ably.

A collaboration between two cousins, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, TOS tells the story of a girl, Rose, who spends a summer at her parent’s Canadian beach house. As a complete aside, do all North Americans have access to a beach house? It’s one of those cultural markers we see in every single imported TV show, like high school corridors lined with lockers and calling tortoises ‘turtles’ even though they’re clearly bloody not.

ANYWAY, there are two things that combine to make this a really compelling book, each contributed by a different Tamaki.

The first is the storytelling. The main character, Rose, is just starting to enter her adolescence, and the book is really about the subtle emotional shifts that that entails, and how she struggles to balance her adult self with her child self. Her best friend, Windy (yes, Windy. I know) serves as a useful counterpoint – she’s a year and a half younger, and so still very much in the ‘child’ stage of life – to her parents, who are dealing with more adult issues that are kept opaque and mysterious to her. Mariko Tamaki is responsible for the writing, and the careful sense of disorientation, and illumination of the complex messages about sex and identity that are thrown at young girls, is brilliantly paced, with great depth beneath every small interaction.

The second is the artwork. Jillian Tamaki takes the visual helm, and she does it with real elegance. The illustrations are all done in shades of dark blue, which lends the air of nostalgia to the whole piece, as well as representing the sea, which is symbolic here of Rose’s changing stage in life. The scenery is lushly filled and detailed, serving as a nice balance against the more simplistic Manga style of the characters’ faces. It is beautiful drawing.

The book itself is aim at a Young Adult audience, so some adult readers might be put off it for that reason. But there’s plenty here for adults to enjoy too, whether it’s evoking memories of our own awkward transitions or just to see a story well told.

--

This is my sixth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 24: The Flick by Annie Baker

My first play of my 100 Book Year is the Pulitzer prize-winning The Flick from American playwright Annie Baker. Oof, that almost sounds like the opening to Wikipedia article. But instead of rewriting it, I’m just going to reference that fact and turn this intro into solid gold through the lazy medium of apparent self-awareness. ANYWAY, it centres on three people working in a run-down little cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s the first I’ve read / seen of Annie Baker, but it’s apparently very representative of her style: lots of small, apparently mundane conversations by everyday people, that are vehicles for big overall emotional shifts. This gives a lot of space for nuance, which I like, and goofball humour, which I like even more. Imagine all the crummiest jobs a minimum-wage cinema attendant might have to deal with, condensed into a few short interactions. It could be depressing, but Baker makes it hilarious. Plays are different to novels in that novels have the...
Post a Comment
Read more