Translated by Montana Kane
English edition published June 2023 via Europe Editions
★★★
Opposites attract: Marie is a would-be professional musician, bent on succeeding well enough at both school and cello that she's selected for a prestigious music academy. Victor has his garage band and an inch-thick file at the principal's office. But when chance pushes them together, they find that working together can keep them both on the right track.
Art can make or break a graphic novel, and it's working well here—clean illustrations, with some lovely moments when they break out of the panel-after-panel format to fill the page with wordless color and movement. (In particular, and I know this is oddly specific, I love Marie's hair.)
At under 80 pages, though, this is a slim volume, and I found myself wishing the story could slow down in places: more about Marie's parents, more about Victor's mother, more about what keeps Victor and Marie together when they're not helping each other towards their goals and Victor isn't pretending to be someone he's not. More about the twins, more about Hussein, more time to explore why Victor struggles in school. (Marie's parents in particular: they, and she, seem to treat the possibility of Marie going to a disability-specific school as something of a punishment, but I have to think that it's much more complex than that—such a school, assuming it's a good one, could give her strategies and solidarity that she might not get elsewhere, and there's no guarantee that the music school would be at all understanding. I'd have loved to see that explored more.) It's well-told overall, but I'd have been happy to see this same story told with twice the page count.
Readers might also consider, on first read, skipping the first page and coming back to it at the end, to have a bit more suspense in the story.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
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