Review: "Stepping Up" by Kiara Valdez, illustrated by Diana Tsai Santos

Stepping Up by Kiara Valdez, illustrated by Diana Tsai Santos
Published August 2026 via HarperAlley
★★★★

Andover was an opportunity Valdez couldn't pass up—an excellent education, a bit of breathing room from a sometimes complicated home life, the promise of future opportunities. It was also a place where she did not fit the mold, and where students who did fit the mold kept reminding her of that...and a place where, eventually, she found her people.

There are relatively few boarding school memoirs out there (though plenty of fiction!), and even fewer written by people who were minority students. For Valdez, Andover represented a certain amount of culture shock—her family and friends did not have the money to go to Broadway shows, or buy the new iPhone, or take fancy vacations; Andover was also way Whiter than she was used to. (Wikipedia says that Andover is more racially diverse than Massachusetts generally, but still very different from Valdez's New York.)

For the most part, Valdez writes Andover as something that was for her a good experience—she made close friends and tried things she wouldn't otherwise have had the opportunity to do. (And, well, my own boarding school was very different from the prep school environment of Andover, but boarding school is an experience that is really like none other.) There are few big dramas here, and certainly not any involving Valdez directly. This isn't always exciting as far as book plots go, but I can't object because 1) that's certainly better for Valdez! and 2) honestly, I'm still looking for a boarding school book that echoes my own experience, and while this isn't it (for myriad reasons, most of which I knew going in), this does feel like much more a reflection of, well, a normal experience of boarding school. What Valdez did experience, over and over again, were microaggressions—sometimes unthinking ones and sometimes, ah, they were not unthinking. (And not so micro.) I can imagine this being a really valuable book for a teenager who is changing environments in the way that Valdez did, not necessarily to boarding school but...things along those lines.

As an aside, I loved the inclusion of step here—it's something I haven't seen performed in a very long while, and it was so lovely to see as an important part of Valdez's experience at Andover. I don't know that much about step, so I'd have loved a bit more history here, but it's a nice plot point. A bit more about Valdez's family also would have been interesting, though that may not have been somewhere she wanted to go for any number of reasons, which is of course entirely fair.

3.5 stars; this is one I'd like to see in a lot of high school libraries.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Blood City Rollers: Move It or Bruise It" by VP Anderson and Tatiana Hill

Blood City Rollers: Move It or Bruise It by VP Anderson and Tatiana Hill
Published January 2026 via Labyrinth Road
★★★

The Blood City Rollers are back at last. This second instalment finds Mina searching desperately for her missing team...who eventually show up with a new home, but also some complications.

These books are super cute, but I find the story a little lacking. I thought the same in book 1—I was so excited for the book (vampires playing roller derby? yes please), but I was left wanting a lot more detail. Why is derby the most important thing in these vampires' unlives? When they find a new place, they give themselves about eight hours to make it safe for vampires to sleep in during the day...and also to lay their new track. I want to know what the stakes are for these vampires, other than being able to say that they've won, and what they do with their time other than play derby.

There are one-time stakes for the match this book focuses on. I'm not sure I love the outcome—lots more new characters, but the books are short, and I already don't have a great handle on the existing characters (not enough time and space for significant character development).

Still fun, and I'll still eagerly read future books, but Roller Girl would be my go-to roller derby graphic novels.

Review: "Lost in Taiwan" by Mark Crilley

Lost in Taiwan by Mark Crilley
Published May 2023 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

In which a jaded teenaged boy is sent to Taiwan to stay with his brother, only he finds himself lost and with no way home...

I found this to be...okay. I've never been to Taiwan and like reading books set in places I've never visited, so this was something of a no-brainer. Plus, I liked some things about Crilley's art in My Last Summer with Cass, and art can make or break a graphic novel.

But the plot felt kind of...teenage boy wet dream? Like, I can see what Paul sees in Peijing: She's cute and nice and drives a little too fast and is happy to shepherd him around and show him the best of Taiwan and put up with his ignorance and flirt with him. But I have a harder time seeing what Peijing sees in Paul. Granted, the reader sees more of him than Peijing does—we see that at the beginning of the book, he's a rude dweeb who is hell-bent on throwing away the chance to explore part of a foreign country. He's polite to Peijing, and fairly quickly starts to see the value of new experiences, but other than Paul saying "yes, go for your dreams"...what is she getting out of their budding relationship? She's getting a boy who calls her "exotic" and thinks it's a compliment (though he does recognize the error of his ways and apologize); a boy who admits that he puts no effort into relationships and instead cuts out the moment things get rough; a boy who is foreign and thus perhaps exciting to her but really doesn't seem to bring much else to the table.

The art is indeed pretty (though I don't really understand why Peijing's irises are often so much bigger than Paul's—the Disney effect, where hot girls have enormous eyes and the boys have normal eyes?). The glimpse at Taiwan is nice, and I read this while visiting my in-laws in India, so I could relate to some of the cultural disconnects. But...the plot is thin, and Paul's character development is too abrupt for me to trust that it'll last. Nice little romance for them, but hopefully it fizzles out and Peijing can find herself someone who knows better to think that his culture is the "normal" one and hers is the "exotic" one.

Review: "Archie, Vol. 6" by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok

Archie, Vol. 6 by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok
Published October 2018 via Archie Comics
★★★

This is the end: It's the spring dance, and although the only romance in the air is between Moose and Midge, everyone is determined to have a good time...just, one of those "everyone" people is determined to have a good time by holding the school hostage at gunpoint.

So...here we are. I liked that Betty and Veronica are fast friends in this—they've both put Archie aside, at least for now, though they're both resigned to the possibility that that might not be forever. I like that the point of this last collection in the series really isn't romance, despite the could-be-romantic setting of the dance.

But oooof the gun plotline rubs me the wrong way. This was published in 2018—the same year as the Parkland high school shooting that left seventeen people dead; the same year as a shooting in a Santa Fe school that left ten dead—and it just feels, in that context, so wildly irresponsible to depict, for shock value, gun-related violence at a school that is resolved in part by incredibly dangerous heroics. See also: The police are almost immediately onsite (the teenagers of today's Archie comics have cell phones, after all), but they don't bust in because...well, either because plot, or because Uvalde hadn't happened yet and so people weren't thinking about the scope of destruction when police are actually needed but sit on their asses instead. (Although seriously—this was a lesson we learned with Columbine, no? Almost twenty years before this volume was published? And at least with Columbine they had the excuse of following what was at the time protocol.)

I don't know. I guess it feels as though all of the plotlines that have been building throughout the series (Betty and Archie! Veronica and Archie! Betty's injury! Reggie's delinquency! Dilton's crush!) are shoved aside to make way for an ill-thought-out school shooting plotline, and I'm not so much here for that. Bringing in the guns and yet going out with a whimper rather than a bang...

Review: "The Girl Who Sang" by Estelle Nadel and Sammy Savos

The Girl Who Sang by Estelle Nadel and Sammy Savos
Published January 2024 via Roaring Brook Press
★★★★

As a child in Poland, Enia Feld (later Estelle Nadel) loved to sing—but when the Nazis came to power and Germany invaded Poland, singing—and just about everything else in her life—became dangerous. What followed were harrowing years and an impossible scope of loss...but also incredible love and resiliance.

This makes for a lovely and detailed, if heartbreaking, look at one young Jewish girl's experience surviving the Holocaust. It's written for an MG/YA audience, so although violence is not shied away from, it's never gratuitous. Children the age of the target reader—to say nothing of children Enia's age—shouldn't have to think about these things, but such as the world is...if it has to be talked about (and it does), this is an age-appropriate way to do so. The losses are multiple and tremendous, but the authors choose to put more of the focus on hope, and on the people who were instrumental to Enia's survival.

The art is a bit simpler than I'd prefer, though I suppose that's at least partly a reflection of Enia's young age in the book and also of the target audience. I love that, in addition to seeing Enia's struggle throughout the Holocaust—the struggle to find somewhere to hide, to find enough to eat, to stay together as a family, to protect loved ones, to keep from imperiling those helping them, to escape—we see so much of her life after the war...because the war might have been over, but the struggle was not. I also love how much of this is a love letter to Enia's family, but in particular her brother, who stepped up again and again and again. So many people in this story had to grow up too fast, and he is no exception, but...well, sometimes it is striking what a child, or near-child, can and will do when adults are unwilling or unable to step up in the same way.

Review: "Archie, Vol. 5" by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok

Archie, Vol. 5 by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok
Published 2018 via Archie Comics
★★★

We pick up right where the series left off: Betty is facing the physical consequences of teenage idiocy (mostly not hers), Archie is facing a whole lot of guilt for those same events, Reggie is trying to get out of the legal consequences, and the whole town has opinions.

I wish this weren't quite so ableist—the initial reaction, across the characters, is that Betty's life will be ruined if she has a permanent physical disability. Betty herself is really determined not to be reliant on anyone else, so there's that, but...gosh. The whole town (including Veronica, who displays an appreciation for Betty that is something of a first for Veronica in this series) has this collective grief at the idea that although their golden girl is mentally fine (albeit with emotional things to work through) she might be visibly physically injured. (Obviously because this is what it is, Betty recovers much of her physical can-do throughout the book; whatever she hasn't regained, I expect she will do in the next volume. And...I have mixed feelings about that too, because while it's great for her and in line with the series, a more realistic outcome would be one that acknowledged that sometimes sheer doggedness isn't enough to overcome serious injury.)

Anyway. The series moves on, and so do I. I really can't fault it for what it is—if this series feel wildly realistic, it's still miles beyond the realism of the originals.

Review: "My Last Summer with Cass" by Mark Crilley

My Last Summer with Cass by Mark Crilley
Published March 2021 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

Megan and Cass are summer friends—they don't see each other for most of the year, but when they're together, they're inseparable. They push each other artistically and understand each other like nobody else...until Cass moves to New York and they drift apart. But one last summer together gives them a chance to connect again...until it all falls apart.

I like the art here a lot (except maybe the eyes, which are so cartoonishly large—all pupil and no iris—that they look like black holes). I was a little more meh on the story: Megan and Cass are given roles and not really allowed to deviate from them (one of them is the cool one and one of them is the small-town good girl), and the way things fall apart makes me want more time for independent character development before the story's resolution (rather than a sort of jump cut). Reminds me a little of Blue Is the Warmest Color in the angst level.

Love that this is a friendship story (no romance!), but probably not one that I'll return to.

Review: "Sea Legs" by Jules Bakes and Niki Smith

Sea Legs by Jules Bakes and Niki Smith
Published February 2025 via Graphix
★★★★

Like most kids, Janey goes to school and comes home—but unlike most kids, "home" for Janey is a boat. And it's time to set sail again, which means that Janey is back to homeschooling and hanging out with adults and adventures that sometimes aren't as stimulating for a kid as they are for an adult.

I love a good graphic memoir, and this is a really interesting one just for being about such a unique experience. For Janey's parents, boat life is a desirable shift from a more standard way of living, but for Janey, it's often just...lonely. Staying in touch with Janey's best friend on land is hard, there are rarely other boat kids, and even when there are, they aren't always people Janey would choose to be friends with normally. Her situation is unusual, but she's still just a normal kid with normal kid desires and emotions.

Janey's friendship with Astrid ends up being some of the most interesting material of the book. That plotline ends in a complicated way—one of those things where you wish this were fiction so that you could know more about what happened after the fact!

The art is a little cartoony for me, but it grew on me as the book went on, and it made sense for the target age range. I hope there's a follow-up eventually.

Review: "Notes from a Sickbed" by Tessa Brunton

Notes from a Sickbed by Tessa Brunton
Published November 2022 via Graphic Universe
★★★★

Well before long COVID hit the scene, Brunton got sick in a way that most people didn't understand—chronic fatigue and post-exertional malaise curtailed her plans and consigned her to, mostly, a couch and a bed. For years. Eventually she found ways to reduce some of her symptoms...but that is not this story. Rather, this is the story of those years on a couch and in a bed, working up the energy to do something only to crash the next day.

I suppose this is a story that is just better understood than it would have been just a few years ago (when, say, Brunton was still in chronic-illness limbo). I think it does an excellent job of balancing the boredom of that stuckness, of everything being curtailed just as you're getting going. I am curious about Brunton's choice not to write about those strategies she was eventually able to employ—not sure if that's a matter of "maybe for another book" or a matter of "better but not well and don't want to confuse the two" or something else. I'm also curious about what various medical professionals were saying at the time, and whether any of it was helpful; Brunton doesn't really get into that, except for mentions of things not covered by insurance and the frustrations of not getting better.

It's a timely read. The art style isn't my favourite, but it gets the job done, and it's a really admirable effort at turning an experience that must have been both exhausting and often terribly boring into something not boring.

Review: "You & a Bike & a Road" by Eleanor Davis

You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis
Published May 2017 via Fantagraphics
★★★★

3.5 stars. You & a Bike & a Road charts Davis's solo bike trip across the American Southwest, eastwards to her home in Georgia. She was biking through negative thoughts, and also with the knowledge that if she had kids it would be years before she could do something similar again. Biking through hot weather and suffering knees and border patrol helicopters flying overhead and swooping down to—Davis guesses, and frankly so do I—check her skin color. Experiencing unexpected kindnesses and witnessing terrifying border patrol–related events and meeting other people on bicycle tours. Knee pain and comics and self-doubt.

Artistically, this reminds me a little of Liana Finck. Though there are some full-page drawings, mostly these are quick sketches done with the free time and energy and supplies that one has on the road. I'm guessing (actually...I can confirm from Davis's social media) that under other circumstances her style is different. I don't mind the simplicity of the style, as it works for the project, though I did wish that at least the cross-outs (there are two on the first page alone) had been edited out. It's almost certainly a stylistic choice, but it just...was not my favorite.

The story itself, though: It's relatively quiet, but Davis works in a lot of recurring themes and understated commentary, making broader points in just a few simple drawings. Would definitely recommend, both in the context of the current US...situation...and for those dreaming of a solo adventure of whatever kind.

Review: "Dear Dad" by Jay Jay Patton

Dear Dad by Jay Jay Patton
With Kiara Valdez and Markia Jenai
Published September 2024 via Graphix
★★★

A graphic memoir about growing up with a parent who is incarcerated—and finding ways to connect both before and after that parent's release.

I picked this up because...well, mostly because the US system of incarceration is so broken, and it seems important to read people's stories about it. Dear Dad is told from a perspective I haven't heard much from—a child growing up with a parent in prison—and touches on the importance of facilitating connection between people who are incarcerated and the loved ones out in the world.

My absolute favorite thing about this (aside from it being from a perspective that I haven't seen much of) is that Patton's father's prison sentence is not the point. Why he was in prison is not the point. What is the point is that prison took him away from his family, and staying in contact was a struggle.

What I did want more of, though...well, first of all, the description of the book is inaccurate. The description says ...the two have sent each other numerous letters. Jay Jay's letters can take weeks or months to reach her dad, and some never even get delivered. What's it going to be like having Dad home? But in the book itself, I don't think we ever see those long pauses, or the real struggle to stay in touch. In fact, their written communication is shown mostly in a brief flashback, and then it's on to Patton's father being home, the family moving to Florida, and Patton's father teaching her coding in part so that they can work together on an app that helps youth better connect with their incarcerated parents.

Patton was young when her father was in prison, so this makes some sense—the letters that I as an adult write are much more complex than the letters that I wrote as a child, and I'm guessing that there was limited material to mine in the letters that Patton wrote, or that her father wrote back. It might have been interesting to see some of what Patton's parents discussed in their own letters; I'm thinking of Mainline Mama here, and of the author working and working and working to maintain her relationship while her partner was in prison. Arguments strung out over weeks rather than minutes (or sometimes gotten over before it's time for the next retort), nobody there to share the physical burden of parenting, your partner having to learn the ins and outs of in-person parenting when your child is old enough to be resentful of a new person stepping in.

Dear Dad touches on this, a little—there's one scene in which Patton objects to her father laying down rules, but that's kind of it, because the focus of the book ends up being more on coding. And make no mistake, that's also great! Girls should have more opportunities to learn coding, and it's frankly pretty awesome to see someone getting out of prison and, it seems, thriving. It's just not really what I expected the book to be about.

Oh, the art—not a style that I'm particularly fond of (a little more comic-y than I like in a graphic novel/memoir, where I almost always want more visual detail), but it gets the job done, especially for a middle grade readership.

One quick note: There are some statistics at the end about how many kids in the US have a parent in prison (and how many adults in prison have kids on the outside), but the statistics don't talk about the disproportionate incarceration of Black men in the US, or the staggering difficulties that many newly released individuals face reintegrating, finding a job, getting used to being on the outside again. I'm guessing that was a deliberate choice, but just noting here that if you're reading this as a starting point it's worth diving deeper.

Review: "Silenced Voices" by Pablo Leon

Silenced Voices by Pablo Leon
Published September 2025 via HarperAlley
★★★★

Jose has never been all that curious about his mother's background—which is just as well, because she shuts down any conversation about her previous life in Guatemala. But when something sparks Jose's curiosity, he starts asking questions...and learns far more than he'd bargained for.

This is the second YA graphic novel I've read recently that is largely about a conflict—first there was Tall Water (partly about the 2004 tsunami, partly about the civil war in Sri Lanka), and now this. In both cases, they're major conflicts; in both cases, the conflicts were barely a footnote in my education. Most of this book is Jose's mother's story: growing up in Guatemala, her family, the incredible violence and loss wrought upon her community. We come back to Jose and his brother now and then, as Jose is trying to figure out what to do with this new information (e.g., the existence of an aunt he was never able to meet), but the crux of the story is about his mother.

It's a hard read, but one well done. I'm not sure why it feels to me less violent (to be clear: the telling, not the actual history) than Tall Water did—perhaps because the events in Tall Water are happening in the story's now, while in Silenced Voices it's happening in the story's past. Again, not a comment on the conflict itself, but this book might be a slightly easier starting point for a teenager reading about conflict. Overall, an excellent effort to amplify unheard voices, and makes me wonder what stories will be coming out in a decade or two that are happening now but aren't making the headlines.

Review: "Bad Kid" by Sofia Szamosi

Bad Kid by Sofia Szamosi
Published March 2026 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

In the early aughts, at the age of 13, Szamosi was dragged out of bed and sent to a wilderness "rehabilitation" program for teenagers. Between then and turning eighteen, she spent two years in such programs...the sort of programs that have more recently gotten quite a bit of press for being ineffective at best and abusive at worst. I've read enough about these programs to say that what Szamosi describes sounds like the milder half of the scale, but...that's partly because the harsher half of the scale is so terrible. Some readers might find some of the themes throughout the book to be a bit much for teenagers, but I think the point here is that this was Szamosi's teenage years...and anyway the worst of it is what was done in the name of "treatment".

The art style is simple but gets the job done. I particularly appreciated the collaged bits included throughout—photos of Szamosi from her teens, snippets of journal entries, the occasional location photo, etc. We're around the same age, and the photos in particular are so evocative of that time period, things that made me think "oh yes, I've known variations of that girl". Photos aside, the illustrations are black and white, with red for emphasis.

Two things I would have liked a bit more of: First, while Szamosi writes her teenaged self with a combination of compassion, wryness, and cringeing (we should all have some teenage moments that we cringe to look back on!), I would have liked a bit more of a sense of direct "looking back". That is...we see that Szamosi can see that she wasn't making a lot of good decisions as a teen, and that she can see now how much her mother was struggling to figure out what to do, how to help her. Most of the actual telling is from the perspective of Szamosi as a teen, though, and I would have loved some more reflection—what does she now think would have been best for her? How much of her teenageness does she now consider concerning, and how much does she think was normal/stuff she'd have grown out of? And second, where did things go after the end of the book? There's a conclusion, but it's a little abrupt, and I can see a number of possible trajectories. Some kind of an afterword might have been nice.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Tall Water" by S.J. Sindu and Dion M.B.D.

Tall Water by S.J. Sindu and Dion M.B.D.
Published August 2025 via HarperAlley
★★★★

Nimmi has grown up in the US, living with her father and communicating with her mother only through letters—but when her father has the opportunity to return to Sri Lanka, where Nimmi is born and her mother still lives, she's desperate to go too. Sri Lanka is still at war, though, and Nimmi soon feels in over her head. And: It's December of 2004. None of them can know what's coming.

This is a graphic novel for young adults, but it's one for readers who can take heavy themes. The major themes are the war in Sri Lanka and the Boxing Day tsunami—Nimmi finds herself witness to the first and right in the middle of the second. (I was going to say that it doesn't hold back, but I don't think that's entirely accurate—for all that Nimmi witnesses, she's on the periphery of violence and presumably has significant protection conferred by her dual citizenship; this would be a very different story if it were about someone living in the thick of it. Nimmi hears some of those stories, but she and the reader are spared the worst of it. She sees bodies (I remember reading news story after news story and just not being able to comprehend the scale of the disaster), but the reader is again spared the worst of it.

It's well done. I didn't need the mini romance of the book (I never need the mini romance), but there's a lot of complexity packed into a relatively short story. War, natural disaster, romance, identity, family history, family reconciliation...I hope this ends up in a lot of high school libraries.

Review: "Archie, Vol. 4" by Mark Waid and Pete Woods

Archie, Vol. 4 by Mark Waid and Pete Woods
Published 2017 via Archie Comics
★★★

And into volume 4 we go! This picks off right about where volume 3 left off, with the crush of the third volume actually going somewhere (I wasn't sure it would). I'm sure there were similar subplots in the original comics, but if there were they never went very far. We also get a bit more from the Blossoms, though theirs seems to be a long-haul sub-plot (info drabbled out across volumes).

But if the Blossoms were the big bads (well, Cheryl, anyway) of the previous volume, it's Reggie this time. He hasn't had much role in the series so far, but...here he is, leering at girls and pushing Archie's buttons until Archie snaps. And that snapping leads to one of the stupidest decisions of the series...and then some other equally stupid decisions. (Spoiler: If you're trying to stop an illegal car race, the thing to do is not to drive headfirst into it.) Archie gets off scot-free, of course, because the cops know Reggie as a troublemaker, and...honestly, that's sort of a problem, no? Oh, very consistent with the Archie comics of old, but it's very much a "reputation is all that counts" thing. And of course the volume ends on a cliffhanger...which I suspect will not last more than midway through volume 5, but hey! Not quite there yet.

Review: "Archie, Vol. 3" by Mark Waid and Joe Eisma

Archie, Vol. 3 by Mark Waid and Joe Eisma
Published 2017 by Archie Comics
★★★

Volume 3! In which Mr. Lodge has had a hissy fit and moved the family away from Riverdale, Veronica has been shipped off to a Swiss boarding school (she's miserable, but honestly, that was my dream as a teenager), and we meet Cheryl Blossom. Cheryl's basically there to be the new Big Bad so that Veronica can be a bit softer—the Veronica of the first couple of volumes wouldn't have thought twice about participating in a mean-girl trick or two, but the Veronica of this volume has developed Morals, and perhaps a Conscience. There's very little of Betty here, except for a moment when Cheryl uses her to learn more about what makes Veronica tick, and we get a minor subplot involving a secondary character who has a crush on Betty...though it remains to be seen whether that plotline goes anywhere.

It's interesting—some things about these comics have been updated. At the end of this one there's a sneak peek into one about Reggie, and in that he raids his father's liquor cabinet, which he'd never have been allowed to do in the squeaky-clean originals; of course the shape of the Betty-Veronica rivalry is a bit different; Kevin (who was introduced to the Archie universe specifically to be The Gay One, because heaven forbid that any of the original characters might come out) is no longer the only queer character. Other things are just the same. They're as over the top as they ever were, with characters who are at times caricatures of the originals...who were themselves already caricatures. That's the point, I suppose! It's the whole genre. But I do wonder what this would look like in a different graphic novel form, with a less slapstick take.

Review: "Alanna" (graphic novel) by Tamora Pierce, adapted by Vita Ayala and Sam Beck

Alanna by Tamora Pierce, adapted by Vita Ayala and Sam Beck
Published May 2025 via Harry N. Abrams
★★★

Pierce's books were staples in my family's household when I was growing up—it started with the Alanna books and grew to include the Circle of Magic books and then it kind of...went from there. My dad loved them as much as my sister and I did, and we bought new books set in whichever universe pretty much the day they came out. I've reread most of Pierce's books many, many times, as a child and as an adult (although admittedly fewer times as an adult).

I loved the recent graphic novel adaptation of First Test, and I was thrilled to see that the OG series is getting an adaptation as well. If anything, it's just surprising that it's taken so long!

The result, though—I'm not quite sure what isn't working for me, but I was underwhelmed. The art makes sense for the story; if anything, it's easier than in the original to see how Alanna could pass as Alan for so long. The emotional connection wasn't really there, though. Partly this might have been that a lot of internal stuff is shoved into dialogue, where it doesn't always fit. Part of it, to be fair, is also that some of the characters I learned so little about in this book also have very little characterization in the original (I went back and reread the original quartet pretty much as soon as I'd finished this).

I'll still be reading the hell out of any sequels as soon as they're published, and I'd still recommend this to both those who grew up with Tortall and those who didn't but read graphic novels now...but my heart is going to stay with the originals.

Review: "Sweet Valley Twins: The New Girl" by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle

Sweet Valley Twins: The New Girl by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle
Published May 2025 via Random House Graphic
★★★

The latest in the series! In which, dear god, everyone is awful. A new girl has moved to town, and the Wakefield parents want Elizabeth and Jessica to welcome her...which Elizabeth at least is willing to do, until it turns out that Brooke is, if not brattier than Jessica (that would be difficult), a whole lot more directly rude. She doesn't want to be friends, and she wants everyone to know it.

Cue Jessica hatching up a harebrained plot to introduce a fictional identical triplet, Jennifer, to become besties with Brooke...and then set her up to be laughed at by the whole school. Now, while I'm not going to even attempt to justify this (it's cruel, and it's intended to be cruel), it is perhaps worth noting that Brooke is so rude about everyone and everything that even Elizabeth is on board with this plan for much of the book—and Elizabeth is usually a very boring little saint. (Maybe also worth noting that "Jennifer" is basically Elizabeth, except a little more wide-eyed and innocent; it's unclear why Brooke likes Jennifer so much when she wouldn't give Elizabeth the time of day.)

I don't really know what to do with this series—the graphic novel adaptations, that is. I read a bunch of the originals when I was a child and really didn't think twice about how priggish Elizabeth was or how horrible Jessica was (or, for that matter, how little their parents seem to care what they're up to until it's too late to do anything about it). I've reread quite a lot of them as an adult (tinges of masochism?) and find the whole thing quite a bit more horrifying. And from what I've read recently of the originals, these adaptations are pretty true to the inspiration, so I can't fault them for the kids being overwhelmingly monsters. The artwork isn't really to my tastes, but it gets the job done. But can I recommend these? I mean...not really. Not any more than I can recommend the originals. Too much by way of kids being absolutely horrible to each other and not retaining any lessons between the end of one book and the start of the next.

Review: "Mia and Friends" by Karlin Gray, illustrated by Micheline Hess

Mia and Friends by Karlin Gray, illustrated by Micheline Hess
Published August 2024 via First Second
★★★

Mm. So this is a middle-grade-or-younger graphic biography of Mia Hamm. I was so pleased to see that this was coming out, because Mia Hamm was my first-ever hero—the 1999 Women's World Cup was quite literally the only television I ever watched at home (we very occasionally rented a videotape to watch a movie, but by very occasionally I mean maybe twice a year; the television was stored in my parents' bedroom closet, and other than the World Cup I have no memories of watching any scheduled programming on it) as a child, which maybe tells you something about my family. I had copies of Go for the Goal and The Game and the Glory because that was the sort of thing we did and frankly still do—went looking for books about things and people that interested us. So, you know. Here we are.

I expect this will be a good one for young readers who are interested in soccer and who don't know that much about this earlier generation of soccer players. Most of the sources (and we stan a book with sources) are from the late 90s or early 2000s, which means that there's little in here that I didn't learn as a child reading obsessively about soccer. I think part of that is that that generation of players did not have the same level of celebrity that today's players do (something that the book discusses somewhat), and consequently there was less self-promotion and fewer memoirs and less direct-from source information. But...I would have loved to see some new information, or something that I wouldn't have seen in a book written in 2001—even a casual mention of a queer player would have felt more up to date (some of the players of that generation were out even then, but it wasn't discussed in most media). Or possibly something about Michelle Akers' chronic fatigue syndrome—that wouldn't be new, but it might feel especially relevant in the context of, e.g., long COVID.

So not really the book for me, but then, I'm really not the target audience here.

Review: "Food School" by Jade Armstrong

Food School by Jade Armstrong
Published April 2024 via Conundrum Press
★★★★

A pleasant surprise. Food School is a quick graphic novel about a woman in an adult intensive outpatient program for an eating disorder. There's not a ton here that's new, but a couple of things that feel notable: first, this is about trying to get better, not about being sick. That might seem like a small distinction, but (take it from somebody who has read too much in specific genres and subgenres and subsubgenres...) it's actually a significant one. Second, Armstrong is good about avoiding (or rather, redacting) things that are realistic in the context of the story but that could be triggering to some readers. And third, while it's not unheard of to have an adult protagonist in this sort of thing, it's still uncommon, and it's nice to see Olive trying to figure out recovery (and I mean: genuinely trying, even when she hates being in the program and hates everyone around her and hates everything about it; she's often ambivalent and doesn't always get it right, but she knows why she's there) while also trying to adult. The ending is abrupt, but overall the story worked better for me than I expected.