The Summer of Love

The Summer of Love by Debbie Drechsler is a roman à clef about the summer a pair of sisters with their parents moved to a new suburb. There's all the eye rolling drama of being a teenager in a new neighborhood.

There's Lili and Pearl. Pearl seems to adapt to the new situation but Lili just doesn't fit in. She has a crush on a boy but he's not interested. She misses her friends. She doesn't like the new house. She's bored. Her sister has a, GASP, girlfriend.

Boohoo. It's so hard being a white upper middle class Baby Boomer. Cry me a river.

I read "The Summer of Love" straight after the disturbing autobiographical "Daddy's Girl" by the same author, which features the same characters when they were younger. Whereas "Daddy's Girl" depicts the tragic abuse Lily had to suffer on the hands of her father, none of it is present in "The Summer of Love", which concentrates on the more classic foes of coming of age in suburban America. Sadly, it is also a road much traveled in contemporary graphic fiction, and Debbie Drechsler's slightly caricatural style does not match the finesse of other authors such as Craig Thomson or Alison Bechdel. What's more, the brownish-greenish color scheme used here is reminiscent of those blue-red 3D images when read without the appropriate colored show more glasses and are tiresome in the long run. show less

Kind of like Lynda Barry's work, but not as good.

Pas mal de bandes dessinées me semblent n'avoir de cesse de réinventer l'adolescence (peut-être car le "neuvième art" fut longtemps considéré comme un loisir adolescent...). Ce livre-là ne fait pas exception : un déménagement et un été durant lequel il s'agit de se faire de nouveaux amis, et voici la narratrice empêtrée dans les émois du "teenager". Éveil de la sexualité (et découverte de l'homosexualité de sa soeur), apprentissage de la vie sociale et, au final, acceptation de sa non-liberté et de son ancrage au sein de cette ville qu'elle dit détester. Tout cela est montré de façon assez originale, dans une bichromie marron-vert mettant paradoxalement en valeur la finesse et l'ambiguïté de ce qui se joue ici. show more Vraiment un bon moment. show less