The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

Thieves is one of my favorite comics so far this year, and it mostly came as a pleasant surprise, because I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, just that I'd heard that it was good. It's fair to say I caught only a fraction of the buzz. In addition to being praised in basically every publication that prints reviews, Thieves won Lucie Bryon the Entente Litteraire Prize, which was presented to her by the queen of England and the first lady of France. Which is pretty impressive for a comic about two queer girls in high school going to house parties, getting drunk, and stealing things!

 

Thieves isn't quite as scandalous as I make it sound, but Bryon is willing to allow her characters to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to handle their emotions and their social relationships badly. But most of the book isn't about doing the wrong thing, its about trying to put it right again afterward. Friends and girlfriends push one another to be better, to try harder.

 

Ella is a social butterfly and a bit of a tomboy; she has a crush from a distance on Madeline, a femme girl who sits in front of her in morning class. Ella's best friend Leslie sits beside her every day, and tells her to stop longing from afar and actually just go talk to her already! But before Ella quite gets the chance, she and Leslie crash a house party, and Madeline is there. Ella is nervous, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up at home to discover that she's stolen a half dozen curios from one of the party host's closets...

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

Ella got home safe the night before hanks to Leslie, and also thanks to Leslie, Madeline comes over that morning to check on her. It turns out that Madeline's been crushing on Ella from a distance too, and now that they both know, they start dating. Ella soon realizes that the person she stole from was Madeline, but there's a twist. All the curios were things Madeline had stolen too. Not because she was drunk; more like acting out at times when she felt overwhelmed by negative emotions.

 

Ella and Madeline agree that it will feel better to stop carrying physical reminders of mistakes around with them. They spend the rest of the book returning the stolen items one by one, sneaking them into house parties and leaving them where the owner will eventually find them. Returning the items means confronting the original negative feelings, which is hard. A few times, Ella and Madeline fight. Leslie helps with a few of the reverse-burglaries, and she helps the couple work things out after arguing. She is like, the straight analogue to the 'gay best friend' character of 90s rom-coms. Like all stories set in the senior year of high school, the story ends with graduation.

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

I like Bryon's characters and her storytelling, and the emotional realism of a shy kid acting out when she gets bullied or teased, in part because she has no one she can talk to. Once Madeline has a real friend and can put her feelings into words, she's able to control her actions better.

 

I also really, really like Bryon's art. Her figures are fairly realistic, but they're also quite expressive. They're like, just the right amount of stretchy and cartoony for the story she wants to tell. Her use of color is great, too. Each scene has a single accent color that reflects to mood and time of day, to complement the black ink drawings. School is orange, outdoors at night is green, parties are red. Some background and scenery details appear solely in color and negative space, with no black outline at all. The colors are soft, and rich, like muted jewel tones. On the few occasions Bryon uses more than one, the art suddenly takes on surprising depth.

Belle of the Ball

 
 
Belle of the Ball

by Mari Costa

First Second

2023

 

 

Belle of the Ball is a cute little YA graphic novel about high school romance. There's a lesbian love triangle, with all the inherent conflict and heartbreak, right at the center of the story, but Mari Costa writes it all very gently, very kindly. The result is much more of a light-hearted romcom than any kind of tale of teen angst. There are no mean girls here, just three young adults trying to follow their hearts, if only they can figure out what they really want first.
 
The cast is three high school senior girls - ambitious cheerleader Regina; her girlfriend, soccer champ Chloe; and shy, nerdy Hawkins. Regina is smart and popular, the head cheerleader who's dating the star player of the soccer team, a straight A student who's already been accepted to the local college but still has her eye set on Harvard, and a future doctor with her 10-year life plan already all mapped out. Chloe is much less ambitious. She likes soccer and is good at it, she gets good-enough grades in everything but English, but prefers video games to studying, and gets bored whenever Regina's talking to her other friends about their goals for the future. It more seems like she's along for the ride than like she genuinely wants the same 10-year plan for herself.
 
And then there's Hawkins. Shy, self-conscious and awkward, nerdy, and an accidental force of chaos, who inadvertently crashed headlong into the fault lines in Regina and Chloe's relationship. Hawkins is also the school's cat-headed mascot. At the start of the story, she asks Regina to the homecoming dance, because she's had a long-time crush on her from a distance, and she mistakenly thought Regina and Chloe had broken up.
 
When Regina realizes that Chloe's recent low grades in English are going to jeopardize her soccer eligibility and her conditional college acceptance (and thus, the 10-year plan), she comes up with a strategy to put things back on track. Regina uses Hawkins's crush to convince her to tutor Chloe in exchange for a chance to hang out with them at school. Hawkins, despite knowing this is a bad idea, really does want more friends, and friendship with Regina specifically, and follows her heart and agrees.
 
Chloe is understandably not impressed with the plan to be tutored by the person who was flirting with her girlfriend, and isn't really interested in being tutored at all. She also quickly becomes suspicious that Hawkins seems to know too much about her, until suddenly, she connects two dots in her mind, and realizes that 'B Hawkins' is the same person as 'Belle,' Chloe's kindergarten classmate and first crush, Belle, who wore a princess dress to school every day, who Chloe used to follow around the playground, wishing she could be her knight. (Separate from this, there's also a running gag that from Hawkins's perspective, she and Regina have hung out several times in group settings, but Regina literally never noticed her there until she asked her out.)
 
You might be able to see where this is going. Regina and Chloe have different visions for their futures, and care about those visions with very different levels of intensity. At the same time that they might be growing apart anyway, Chloe and Hawkins suddenly start spending a lot more time together, and any feelings of attraction either of them may start to develop have a certain sort of plausible deniability to them ... right up to the end, when the feelings become so strong they're undeniable.
 
And as I said, it's all handled in a way that's fairly emotionally mature, with a minimum of raised voices or tears. Early on, it might be easy to think that Regina is controlling or manipulative, Chloe a bully, or Hawkins a pushover, but they all quickly grow beyond that. Regina tends to dominate any scene she's in, but we spend most of the book with Chloe and Hawkins. They spend a lot of time at home studying, but a highlight - narratively, visually, and emotionally - comes when Chloe buys Hawkins a ticket to the Renaissance Fair and rents her a princess dress, the first time she's worn one in years...
 
Costa's art is friendly and accessible. Aside from the black outlines and white negative space, all the tones are shades of pink. It's not just an accent color, this is a very pink book, and all the shades are different saturations of fuchsia pink (or what you might call 'Barbie pink'). Costa gives us a diverse cast, both ethnically and in terms of body types. The general absence of mean-spirited intent makes this a light read, and the art style complements that.

Griffin and Sabine

 
 
Griffin and Sabine

An Extraordinary Correspondence

by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1991 

 

 

Griffin and Sabine is both an art book and an epistolary novel - it is a story told in the letters exchanged between the title characters, letters that are beautifully, even tactilely reproduced on the book's pages. On the first page is the image of a postcard. Turn the page, and on the back is the image of the back of the card, handwritten message, address, stamps, airmail notice, and all. Each page is like this. Some are full letters. Again, first you see the image of the front of the envelope. Then, not just an image, but an envelope fixed to the page. Open it and take out the letter to read. This is a remarkably hands-on book.
 
The first card is from Sabine. She lives on a small island in the South Pacific. Griffin lives in London. Sabine has a kind of magical or psychic connection to Griffin, and is reaching out to establish conscious, verbal contact. Griffin is initially skeptical, then surprised, but as they exchange postcards, they quickly develop rapport, and learn enough about each other to realize they make good friends, regardless of how they've met.
 
Griffin has a small stationary shop and designs postcards professionally. Sabine works for the island government designing stamps, which are popular enough with international collectors to be a good source of revenue. They share their life stories, their views on art. Their friendship maybe begins to turn into attraction. Griffin seems to be the more reserved of the two; Sabine the more free-spirited.
 
I'm not sure if their unusual meeting and exchange of letters is the catalyst (although it seems like it is), but for whatever reason, Griffin starts decompensating, and begins falling into depression. The end of the book is clearly just a pause in the story, as one of the pair makes a plan to visit the other in person.

Green Dot

 
 
Green Dot

by Madeleine Gray

Henry Holt

2024

 

 

Green Dot is a literary novel about a young woman's affair with an older, married man. Hera, our narrator, tells us on the first page that every other story like this showed her what she should expect, told her how it would end, but she was certain that, for her, it would be different.
 
Hera's voice is really what makes this novel work. Madeleine Gray has created a narrator who's both witty and wry but also chatty, smart without being boring or distant. She's very quotable! I'm actually going to include some quotes in this review, which I don't usually, because so many jumped out at me that I went back and wrote them down. Most of Green Dot is told in the present tense, as though it's happening now, but from time to time, the slightly older Hera who's actually doing the telling will add some of the benefit of her perspective, often humorous.
 
I like that Hera is aware of her mistakes and willing to admit them, but also has had enough time to forgive herself for them. She doesn't pretend they didn't happen, doesn't make excuses, but also doesn't just excoriate her younger self either. I think something I appreciate in coming-of-age stories, something I maybe can't enjoy them without, is that double perspective, that recognition of where the younger version could've been better, where the older self has finally learned. Without that, I think you just get a celebration of irresponsibility, you get a refusal-of-age, a desire to stay young, learn nothing, make the same mistakes forever.
 
The first part of Green Dot is the funniest. When we first meet Hera, she's finished college and moved back in with her dad. She's Australian, and considers herself a lesbian. She has friends she's been close with since high school, and all of them have jobs, partners, all of them have started building adult lives. Hera doesn't have or particularly want a job, but she does want to be an adult, so she gets a job as a comment moderator for a newspaper's website. Her observations about office life are great, as when she first realizes that indeed, not only did she not want a job, she specifically doesn't want this job: "I smile the smile of someone who is satisfied because her predictions about everything being awful are correct. I smile the smile of a young woman who, at the behest of her partnered-up girlfriends, goes on a Tinder date with a guy who looks like a wanker in his profile, and on the date the first thing he talks about is his love for Elon Musk, and she just sits there, ecstatic, holding back a tear of self-congratulation, thinking, Yes, exactly. Exactly as I imagined." (33)
 
The whole time Hera's working at the newspaper, she's bored, unsatisfied, waiting for her life to start. She both wants to be included in the office social life, such as it is, and also finds it all unbearably cringey. "I want to die but, devastatingly, this does not occur. I am very much alive, and sitting on a rolling chair." (37)
 
Eventually she meets Arthur, a reporter who feels like the one person in the place who's on her same wavelength. Hera has one running IM chat going with one of the other moderators, and starts another with Arthur. He invites her out to drinks with the other journalists. The second time, they go out for a late dinner after the drinks. And then Hera brings him home, and they have sex.
 
And then, then, immediately afterward, she finds out he's married.
 
From here, the rest of the book repeats in cycles. Hera and Arthur are happy together. Hera learns something that makes her realize she ought to break up with Arthur, but decides she doesn't want to. She tries to live with it, but it makes her more and more unhappy. She finally talks to Arthur, who promises he'll tell his wife about the affair and leave her. But he doesn't. Hera gets sadder and sadder. She tries to make a break from Arthur, but he convinces her to take him back, and for awhile, they're happy again, until the next crisis, when the cycle starts again.
 
But it's not just a cycle; it's a downward spiral, and with each turn, it gets worse. Hera gets sadder and more stressed. Her life contracts as she spends less time with her friends, less time doing anything she enjoys, and more and more time waiting for Arthur. She wants to be available and ready, whenever he can find a few free hours to slip away from his wife. She wants to be on her phone, on Instagram, the app they use to communicate, in case he messages her, in case even just his green dot appears, indicating he's online, indicating he can see she's online too. To try to get away, Hera quits her job at the newspaper, she moves away. But she also keeps coming back.
 
The first turn of the screw is the happiest, maybe even moreso than when they're first tentatively dating, before the first time they have sex. Hera and Arthur sneak around Sydney, renting cheap hotel rooms, trysting in parks, avoiding parts of the city where anyone might know or recognize them. Hera's closest friends know about the relationship. They don't approve, but they try to support her. "You cannot tell your friends that their relationship is doomed because their partner is trash. You cannot even tell your friends that their partner, though they may not be trash, is nevertheless just not that good." (152)
 
But what Hera discovers is something I learned too, when I was trying to stay in the closet about being trans - when you're keeping something big enough and important enough secret, it's almost impossible to build friendships. People may like you, but they don't really know you, and you can't feel any mutual recognition or connection like that. "If you are trying to make a friend in a new city, you don't want the potential friend's first piece of knowledge about you to be that you are an unsuccessful homewrecker. A homewrecker is bad enough - but one who did all the bad things and still didn't get the guy? That's not only morally bankrupt, it's pathetic." (186)
 
Hera could 'come out,' could tell the truth about herself, but she doesn't. "They all think I'm single and so are constantly trying to set me up with their housemates, lauding Bill's pasta-making prowess or Tina's bouldering strength. Bisexuality is a curse in this way: you must fend off double the terrible set-ups." (236) She goes on some dates, with young men and women her own age. She even sleeps with them, but only ones she doesn't really like. She prevents herself from forming emotional attachments that might lead her away from Arthur.
 
Why does Hera do this to herself? It's because, from the very first time they fuck, she falls in love with Arthur. She wants a life with him, wants to marry him, live openly with him. "People write about desire all the time, and I read the poems, I see the films. I've had sex a fair bit, I'll not pretend I haven't. But nothing can prepare you for that moment during sex with that one person with whom it all makes sense, like, Oh. Oh, I see now. I understand." (128)
 
She spends the whole book languishing in a diminishing half-life because she's convinced it's only temporary. She's convinced that he'll divorce his wife, that he'll be with her, only with her. She's convinced that the happiness she feels while they're having sex will be how she feels all the time when they're really together, when they're together openly. "When Arthur is inside me and my eyes are on him and our bodies move in tandem; I remember that I was not always sad, and that one day I might not be again. Perhaps this seems to you like a low bar for love. But trust me, and if you know you know - it really, really isn't." (146)
 
While Gray writes Hera as flippant and sly most of the time, when she talks about her love for Arthur, she's utterly vulnerable and sincere.
 
If you've ever had a one-sided crush on someone, you know how hard it is to make yourself stop wanting them. How impossible it feels, especially at first. And at least, in that endeavor, you're aided by the knowledge that the other person doesn't want you back. Hera doesn't even have that. "The fog clears in my mind: no thoughts, just ecstatic pleasure. I understand why people start wars, I understand why people blow up their lives. If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time." (228)
 
To all appearances, Arthur genuinely loves her too. He is pained (not as much as she is, but still) by the hurt he's causing Hera by not getting a divorce. He sincerely seems to not want to hurt her, but he is, he is, because he keeps making her the same promise, and keeps not fulfilling it.
 
I don't really need to tell you how Green Dot ends, do I? Hera told you, on page 1, what happens. She told you this story goes the same way these kinds of stories always go. What makes this book special is the excellent narrative voice, and the unflinching way Gray shows us the comprehensive destruction of Hera's entire life and sense of self in pursuit of a goal that isn't even hers to achieve, that can only be achieved for her, by a man who keeps telling her he will do something and then keeps not doing it.

Loveless

 
Loveless
by Alice Oseman
Scholastic

2022

 

 

Loveless is a young adult novel by author / artist Alice Oseman, who's most famous for her Heartstopper comics. In a plot structure that reminds me of a lot of slice-of-life anime, and presumably many campus novels, we follow our first-person narrator Georgia from high school graduation through her first year of college.

 
Georgia has two best friends from high school, Jason and Pip (who is a lesbian,) and soon makes two more college friends, her party girl roommate Rooney, and LGBT club president Sunil. The five of them share an interest in theater, and one of the plot strands is about them forming a Shakespeare society and putting on a play by the end of the year.

 
The most important plot elements though, are all about romance. Georgia is a big fan of romcoms and fanfics. She's never dated or kissed anyone, but feels certain she's going to. What she begins to realize, is that while she wants to want sex and romance, she doesn't actually want then. In fact, every time she tries, she gets repulsed and nauseous. What the audience realizes, long before Georgia does, is that she's asexual.

 
Meanwhile, Jason has a crush on Georgia, and she tries dating him to see if she can learn to be attracted to someone. This goes poorly!

 
Georgia and Rooney, as roommates, quickly become good friends, even though Rooney is very confident and extroverted, while Georgia is introverted and awkward in social situations. (Although I'm not ace, I found Georgia's shyness and clumsiness very relatable!) 

 
Pip has a crush on Rooney, but assumes Rooney is straight. And Rooney realizes that she has a crush on Pip, but thinks Pip is jealous of her and Georgia's friendship. The audience can see their mutual attraction almost immediately, but it takes them all year to each figure the other out.

 
As I've noted, there's a lot of dramatic irony as the main characters struggle to understand emotions that the reader sees more clearly than they do. Writing for a YA audience, Oseman's prose is simple but clear, broken into quick chapters that are usually just a couple pages long. We don't get much visual description or poetic language, but we do get natuaralistic dialogue, authentic-seeming college social life, and a focus on emotional realism.

 
I like that Georgia doesn't start the book knowing that she's asexual, or even fully understanding that it's not just that she hasn't felt attraction yet, it's that she's probably not going to feel it at all. It takes her half the book to figure out, and when she does, she's sad and angry before she learns to accept herself. I also like that Oseman engages with the tension between the romantic narratives Georgia likes to read, and the reality of her asexuality. 

 
Some of the pop culture references feel a bit like Mad Libs (you could substitute another title and it would make no difference,) and some of the characters' conversations about asexuality sound a bit like one person reading an encyclopedia entry at the other. That is kind of how real people sometimes talk about their fandoms and their new identities, but I find it annoying when they do. It's what you do when you don't know your own mind well enough to speak authentically, so you resort to, effectively, paraphrasing a citation at the person you're tying to talk to. I wish Oseman had tried a bit harder to say some of these things in plain language. It probably is realistic for the characters to name-drop and try out jargon, but I wished that she as the author could have modeled a more naturalistic way of talking about these topics.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

 
 
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki
art by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
First Second
2019

 

 

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me  is a graphic novel about a teenage lesbian's emotional journey to finally be the one to break up with her pretty but inconsistent girlfriend.

 
Freddy is Asian-American and has a White father. She lives in present-day California, and has a racially diverse, all-queer friend group. In addition to watching the story unfold, we also get a kind of voice-over narration as Freddy writes several emails to an online advice columnist, and at the end, as the columnist writes back.

 
The story opens at a high school Valentine's Day dance. Freddy is there with her friends. Laura Dean shows up late, sweeps Freddy off her feet for a few dances, then disappears, until Freddy finds her making out with another girl in an empty classroom. Later, Laura breaks up with Freddy by text. They stay broken up for a week, until Laura suggests they get back together, and Freddy agrees. This is the third time this has happened, hence the title.

 
While they're broken up, Freddy is miserable, despite her friends' attempts to help her, but when they get back together, she becomes a bad friend in other ways, skipping out on her friends on short notice whenever Laura texts. The person who suffers the most from this is Doodle, who obviously has a crush on Freddy, and is also going through something difficult in secret, and really needs her friend's support. Eventually Freddy learns the self-respect she needs to break up with Laura, and at prom, we see her and Doodle dancing together.

 
Rosemary Valero-O'Connell's art is pretty. It's black outlines on white, with a couple shades of grey and one shade of pink used as accent colors. This style of having a single accent color, used artistically rather than for symbolic meaning, is something I've now seen a few times in recent comics.

 
I think this one would actually be appropriate for teenagers. It also won an ALA award for excellent YA literature. We see some kissing, and a few panels of Freddy and Laura lying on top of a bed in tshirts and boxer shorts, but this is a story about emotions, mostly. We also hear a reference to the existence of heterosexual sex, that there are such things as condoms, that they can break, and pregnancy can result.
 

Although all the characters are queer, what we see them struggle with is not understanding what their identities or sexualities are, but rather, what to do with them, with universal questions about what you deserve from a relationship, or how to balance your partner and your friends.

The Very Nice Box

 
 
The Very Nice Box

by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Mariner Books

2021
 
 

The Very Nice Box is kind of a wild ride. It has a great cover illustration that makes it look like a contemporary romance novel, and it includes a romance plot, but it's not so straightforward. It's also a workplace comedy, a satire, and character study of its protagonist, and in places even a thriller.

 
We follow Ava, a senior engineer of containers at STADA, an IKEA-like design firm that makes things like thr Practical Sofa, the Precise Wristwatch, and Ava's current project, the Very Nice Box. Ava starts the novel very serious and proper, in part because she's still grieving over a car crash that killed her girlfriend and parents several years earlier. She likes her work and her routines, and has no time or interest in anything else.

 
Ava's orderly life is upset by a series of changes at work. Mat, a handsome bro in marketing gets promoted and starts all kinds of positivity and wellness initiatives - including mandating that everyone either attend a certain number of seminars or use the SHRNK psychiatry app, which Ava does. Also protestors are targeting STADA's new building. 

 
When Ava's car gets vandalized, she gets a ride home from Mat, develops a crush, and following the advice of her SHRNK, pursues the relationship, even though all the turmoil restarts traumatic flashbacks to the crash. Despite the stress, and Mat's bro-y flaws, she finds herself falling in love.

 
HR finds out about the relationship and sends Mat to Ohio. Ava goes on a couple dates (one with a man, one with a woman,) but still misses him. He comes back and moves in, and finally the glow begins to wear off. Ava has to decide if she really likes Mat, or if it was just short-term infatuation.

 
Woven through are a couple mysteries - who is behind the increasingly surreal STADA protests?, and what secrets from Mat's past explain why he joined the Good Guys, a group that seems halfway between AA and a redpill organization? While I don't want to give away the answers, I will say that the last few chapters are a rollercoaster of excitement and tension.

 
The style of the prose shifts over the course of the book to match Ava's shift from being compacted by grief to opening back up. Queerness is presented casually and treated normally. The parodic elements (mostly aimed at companies and corporate jargon) are genuinely funny, but there's also a much sharper critique of certain aspects of contemporary heterosexuality and masculinity that grows throughout and drives the conclusion of the story. I came in looking for light-hearted romance and double entedres, and got much more than I expected!