Skim's quick glimpse into an angst-ridden, strong-willed and intense young adult made me reminisce and feel grateful for making it through those years unscathed. Side note: I love it when the blurb really gets the core of the book right. An edgy, keenly observed and poignant glimpse into the heartache of being young. Suicide, depression, love, being gay or not, crushes, cliques, and finding a way to be your own fully human self-are all explored in this brilliant collaboration by cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. As concerned guidance counselors provide lectures on the "cycle of grief," and the popular clique starts a new club (Girls Celebrate Life!) to bolster school spirit, Skim sinks into an ever-deepening depression.Īnd falling in love only makes things worse. When Skim's classmate Katie Matthews is dumped by her boyfriend, who then kills himself, the entire school goes into mourning overdrive. "Skim" is Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a not-slim, would-be Wiccan goth who goes to a private girls' school. So to have now finally read through Skim from cover to cover is beyond gratifying for me. When I started down the wonderful path that is reading graphic novels last year, This One Summer by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki was one of the first works I checked out. Don't make me judge you for not picking it up. This is the best graphic novel you haven't read yet, kids. Now I just have to decide if I want to break it into two parts when I assign it, so we have some space to absorb it slowly, or if I should make the students read it in one go, just to feel the rush of "what the hell was that amazing thing" that I felt when it was over. This is the most satisfying, absorbing reading experience I've had in a long time. I don't think I've ever read a graphic novel that so brazenly exists in subtext, that acts out the outsider-y repressed nature of its protagonist so artfully, absolutely refusing to divulge all the layers of its meaning on a first pass.
It's the kind of good that makes you realize as you're reading it that you're only getting a tenth of what's going on, and then when you put the book down it starts unfolding, like you're still reading it, and man is that a warm, strange, velvety feeling to have going on in your head. Man, I am so tired of reading every-graphic-novel-I-should-have-read-but-didn't in preparation for a course I start teaching in a month, but it was all completely worth it to read Skim.
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