50books_poc | Aya, Skim

28. Marguerite Abouet, Aya.
29. Marguerite Abouet, Aya of Yop City.

These didn't really resonate with me, I'm sorry to say -- they've gotten excellent reviews before on this comm, and I'm sure they will again in the future.

For myself, I got very tired of the girls' boy-chasing, the boys' girl-chasing, and the hidden-motives duplicity about it on all sides. There was pretty much no one I was rooting for except Aya, and Aya doesn't do much, except study, babysit, cluck her tongue from time to time, and stay out of the mess. If I could get past my distaste for all the catch-a-boy/girl machinations, I think these volumes would be fun, but the farther I went, the more they read like Days of Our Lives set in Côte d'Ivoire, and after a while I was channeling Aya: clucking my tongue regretfully and wanting to stay out of the mess. :-/

30. Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Skim.

Ah, but I loved this. Beautiful, poignant graphic novel about a teenage, goth, lesbian, Japanese-Canadian pagan, trying to learn to love and feel and yet not be too deeply wounded by the world. Oh, she like to broke my heart.

There were many touches here that I loved. The artwork had a way of blindsiding me with panels that would betray a thought that Skim is unwilling to voice, not even in her internal monologue. Then there's the weird, grasping futility of being a teenager, of living life in borrowed spaces, on borrowed equipment, in other people's margins. And there were the lovely inter-character dynamics: the people who ostensibly care about you are too often the people who are the most casually cruel to you; the anti-whatever crusaders trampling and destroying those who they supposedly care about; the irresistable seduction of someone who "gets" you; the way one's feelings -- especially one's crushes -- don't respond to what one knows to be true; the isolation one can feel from people who supposedly share one's identities, belying the idea that it is one's identities that isolate one from others; how difficult it can be to find someone to trust, even in a world that is full of people clamoring at you that they can be trusted. And here is a portrayal of depression, pain, and surviving someone else's suicide that rings true.

I make it sound depressing, don't I? For some, I suppose, it might be. For others, though -- for me -- it's a portrait of pushing on, grasping for a way to live life around the pain, and to find the people who aren't afraid of your pain. The people who are willing to laugh with you, even in the face of what you both know.