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 23: Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in. The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails. That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part –...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 42: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe. It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core. The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration. The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 44: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, the star of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger , is about as big a shit as you can imagine without actually being a psychopath or criminal. This book, then, is all the more impressive for being able to take such a dislikeable character and reveal the reasons why she is the way she is, and make you empathise and sympathise with her. Actually, before we get into that, let’s address the stripy lunar elephant in the room: Moon Tiger is a brilliant title for a book. It’s the sort of title I imagine that, when she came up with it, Lively lit a big cigar and swanned around the house for days chuckling to herself. A tiger! From the moon ! Whimsical diversions aside, this book has nothing to do with tigers or the moon, so get that out of your head right now. It’s actually about a woman evaluating the history of the world as it relates to her, and the discovery of the events in her life that developed her personality. It’s also a book that’s very concerned with the fal...
Post a Comment
Read more