Anyway, I want to call your attention to their Great Graphic Novels for Girls website. It’s clearly organized and full of awesome recommendations, should you happen to be a girl or know girls or just want to read some outstanding graphic novels.

I loved it! She gets middle school girl relationships perfectly, the way a group of friends chooses one to pick on. They don’t even know they’re doing it, necessarily, but enough “just kidding!”s really hurt. Not to mention, of course, that this is the ideal book to put braces angst in perspective. It spans a number of years, promising that by the time you’re settled in high school, the teeth and the friends do get better.

The whole package — art and writing and dramedic tone — reminded me of Hope Larson’s Chiggers, which is high praise indeed.

(And if you also grew up in the late 80s, you will love the “period” touches. I had completely forgotten about Caboodles. I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that Raina Telgemeier graduated high school a year ahead of me.)

Also reviewed at: Lavender Lines (who also has fond memories of the Caboodle), Abby (the) Librarian, and Stacked

I’m super-excited about both of these: they were two of my personal favorites. (I even gave Rapunzel’s Revenge to my friend Kate Diamond as part of her wedding present, a bad-ass redhead for a bad-ass redhead.)

Congratulations to all of the 2008-2009 Cybils winners, and to all the finalists and panelists! I can’t wait for next year.

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The story is complicated, but only rarely confusing: Nomiya devotes himself to the girl he paralyzed, but can’t bring himself to get back on the road; Togawa’s oldest friend Azumi works to get her driver’s license so she can drive him around; Togawa quits the wheelchair basketball team Azumi manages because the other players are too quick to use their handicaps as an excuse to go easy on themselves; Nomiya has repeated run-ins with his former teammates.

This is the first volume of a series, so few of the storylines resolve. I wish that the volume felt more self-contained, but it’s a minor quibble. This is a top-notch graphic novel — and I say that as someone who couldn’t care less about basketball or hot-shot boys. The action scenes on and off the court are gorgeously dramatic. I especially loved the characters’ faces: they’re deeply expressive, without overdoing it the way that manga sometimes does.

And these are people who have a lot to emote about. There are real issues here (uh, as the title would imply), and they’re handled with humor and sensitivity. One of my favorite sequences is a dream that one character has after a car accident hospitalizes him: his legs are bound with barbed wire, and they’re stretching away from him. He reaches out for his legs, but they aren’t attached to him anymore. I’m not paralyzed, so I obviously have no idea how it feels, but this scene is as evocative a depiction of paralysis as any I’ve seen.

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This is sort of a story about Abby and Shasta, but it’s mostly a story about camp — how friendships shift from one summer to the next and even one day to the next; how camp is this crucible for adolescent self-discovery. I didn’t go to your standard summer camp with cabins and swimming and macrame; I went to CTY (Carlisle session 2 ’91-’94, baby!), nerd camp on a college campus. But I recognized Chiggers all the same (boy, did I ever). I’m pretty sure people who didn’t do the camp thing will love this — it’s about friendships, after all, and everyone has those — but it gave me a special kick in the nostalgia-pants. Every scene had an analog in my own camp memories.

For example, Abby and her friends are discussing the girl who went home with chiggers:

Zoe: And she got them in the worst place, too!
Abby: Where?
Beth: … There?! That’s disgusting!
Abby: Where?
Beth or Zoe (we just see a hand tousling Abby’s hair): Aw, you’re so innocent, Abby.
Abby: You guys suck.

Ouch. That scene totally never happened to me.

I don’t mean to make this review all about psychoanalyzing my inner 13-year-old. I’m just amazed at how well Hope Larson captured adolescent girl silliness, introspection, and insecurities. It’s a little unsettling.

The art is pretty much perfect — high-contrast, no shading, but with wonderfully expressive faces. In one of my favorite moments, Shasta has just casually mentioned to Abby that she broke up with her boyfriend and now likes the same boy Abby likes. Half of the page is a tall panel of Shasta looking in the mirror, brushing her long black hair, which cascades down to fill the bottom of the panel. Abby is crouched in a corner of Shasta’s all-encompassing hair, shivering, diminished in the face of Shasta’s gorgeousness and (Abby assumes) obvious power to have any boy she wants. Shasta is blissfully unaware of Abby’s reaction.

In summary: love, love, love. I can’t wait to make all my kids read this. Maybe this will be the book that will convert them to graphic novels!

Also reviewed by Elizabeth at A Fuse #8 Production and Your Neighborhood Librarian at Pink Me.

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PJ opens with a terrorist bomb going off in Metro City, killing a number of people, and injuring more — including Jane. She’s fine, but the experience makes her decide she has to be “different,” to move away from her popular-crowd friends and embrace her artsy side. When her parents decide they’re too scared to live in the city anymore and move to the ‘burbs, hours away, Jane is “in hell” — there’s no art in Kent Waters! But then she meets the Janes: three very different outsider girls (who happen to be named Jane, Jayne, and Polly Jane), lunchtime seatmates of convenience who are bonded by Jane into an unstoppable force of public art. Meet P.L.A.I.N.: People Loving Art in Neighborhoods!

Unfortunately, it turns out gift-wrapped monuments and bottles hanging from a tree with messages inside — “sing,” “dance” — look like terrorism to the good people of Kent Waters. P.L.A.I.N. is shut down. …Until, in JiL, Jane applies for an arts grant to produce their biggest project yet.

I want to love these books. (And honestly, despite the lit-crit nit-picking to come, I did love them.) Misfit girls find a voice and true friendship through quirky displays of public art: what’s not to love? But so much of it feels off. The post-9/11 theme of overcoming fear is timely and important, but it comes across as forced — the sheriff, in particular, is far too one-dimensional a villain. Maybe I’m naive, but I didn’t buy that the town’s reaction to P.L.A.I.N. would be so universal and vehement.

But then, this is a classic high school movie. The Janes are right out of central casting: Sporty Jane hates shopping; Science Jayne has to design a pheromone to get a boy to like her; Theatre Jane talks in pretentious quotations. (And yes, they refer to themselves by those monikers.) There’s even the school dance scene where the kids save the record store. There are glimmers of originality in each of the characters — the best is Cindy, the blonde queen of the school who ends up invested in P.L.A.I.N. for her own reasons — but they never really shine. The story deserves better.

But here’s the thing: I loved these books anyway, and my issues with them won’t bother most kids, who will love them even more. It never hurts to read a warm ‘n fuzzy about girls who change their corner of the world for the better. After all, we certainly need more creative, beautiful public art — and many, many more bright and committed world-changers!

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Emi goes, of course, and is caught up in the performance art world of the Freaks. As she discovers, “not being noteworthy at the Factory was kind of like not existing.” And Emi wants to exist, to be noticed. So she reinvents herself as a performance artist, using her grandmother’s clothes from her career as a dancer, and Mrs. Cuthebert’s diary of her miserable marriage. Emi’s act is wildly successful, but there’s only so long before her deceptions — and those of all the other characters — unravel.

My favorite thing about Emiko Superstar is the quiet, casual way it breaks down stereotypes. It’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story with a female protagonist — Emi doesn’t have romantic feelings for Poppy (the dreadlocked dancer), but she’s in love with her MPDG sparkle all the same. The family Emi baby-sits for is clearly having problems — but it’s the wife who eventually leaves for another woman, not the husband. While it can be hard to tell if characters in comics are fat, Emi is certainly round — and when she makes her grand entrance in her grandmother’s skimpy ’60s dress, she’s also hot. The story and art make that clear, and never make any excuses for her body. And of course, Emi’s biracial, but it’s just one of the things she happens to be; the story is about other things.

I remember all too well being on the fringe of a group that was just a little older, a lot cooler, and a whole lot more flamboyantly weird than I was. Their dramas — the cutting, the girlfriend who threatened suicide, the friend with a drug problem — seemed glamorous from the outside. I wanted the drama, because it appeared inextricably linked with the gloriously free self-expression. They were my Manic Pixie Dream Girls (and Guys). I love that when Emi is accepted by the Factory girls and goes behind the scenes, she sees the drama for the sadness that it is — but that doesn’t mean that she has to give up her artistic side, or even stop being friends with this group. This book is a clear-eyed, unromantic love letter to freaks and the ordinary people trying to find their place among them.

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The Arrival, Shaun Tan: I almost never say this, but you must all go find this book and “read” it now. (Is it reading if there are no words? Parse it? Consume it? Anyway…) My friend Alison of the Wellesley Booksmith showed this off at a teachers-and-librarians event last fall, and I’ve been longing to spend more time with it ever since.

Ok, shut up with the vague kvelling, already. This is the story of a man who escapes his threatened home to start a new life on foreign shores, leaving his wife and daughter behind until he has enough money to send for them. It’s told entirely in rich sepia-toned pencil drawings (click that link to look at more pictures, but don’t read the text — the book is more powerful if you let it unfold slowly).

I normally have trouble without words, but The Arrival was perfectly clear. The story is not about immigrating from or to a particular place at a particular time. Words would have tied the story down to specifics — the fantasy images immerse the reader in the mystifying immigrant experience in general.

The Adventure of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick: This year’s Caldecott Medal winner isn’t a “picture book” in the usual sense. It’s more of a YA novel, told half in words and half in pictures, “evok[ing] the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage” (as the Caldecott blurb says).

I didn’t know about the silent movie angle when I started it, and from the title and the drawings and the mysterious automaton that is the Invention, I expected a story with a touch of magic and fantasy. It was a bit of a let-down for me to find the story tied to a real person, Georges Melies, a director of silent films who invented the early versions of many of the special effects we use today. It shouldn’t have been a let-down, though, because Melies’s work is every bit as fantastic as my imagined magical automaton. So now you know to expect it and won’t be unfairly disappointed!

Being introduced to Melies turned out to be the best part of the book for me. I found the story overly simplistic, and the characters constantly keep pointless secrets from each other just to draw out the story. But the pictures are lovely, and the technique of telling chunks of story with film-scene-like drawings is a neat trick. Certainly worth a look if you’re into creative storytelling devices.