This
One Summer is a beautiful, haunting young-adult graphic novel by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, cousins from Toronto whose work spans media from prose to film to comics.
It's the story of Rose and Windy, a pair of adolescent girls who are "summer friends," meeting every year in a lakeside cottage-town where their families rent adjacent summer places. This year, Rose and Windy's lives are in the liminal state between girlhood and adolescence, something they're both painfully aware of, but unable to readily admit.
The Tamakis spin a story that is every bit as bittersweet as the great
coming-of-age stories, a modern Stand By Me or Breakfast Club. Jillian
Tamaki's art is spectacular in an understated and finely controlled
way, an economy of line that reveals deep emotion and movement through
hints and glimpses. And Mariko Tamaki's writing manages to wind
together a small-town love-story, a parental marriage on the rocks,
and the weird world of sexuality seen from the near side of puberty
into a whole that is both dreamily nostalgic and immediate and sharp.
This One Summer is one of those books with the power to
change young peoples' lives, to become a guidebook and a touchstone
through adolescent turbulence. It's wonderful.
This
One Summer
