BOOK: Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki
The graphic novel Skim is a quick glimpse of the life of Kimberly Keiko Cameron, "Skim," sulky biracial Goth tenth-grader growing up in Toronto in the early 1990s. Skim's broken her arm, tripping over a make-shift Wiccan altar in her bedroom. She snipes at her best friend Lisa, smokes down in the ravine behind her all-girls school, and falls in love with her drama and English teacher, Ms. Archer. Her high school, she says, is "goldfish tank of stupid."
I thought Skim did an excellent job of conveying the indeterminate, changeable quality of the teen years and teen relationships--that shaky sense of looking for authenticity when you don't yet quite know who you are. Part of the plot is driven by Skim's relationship with her teacher, which she doesn't yet fully understand herself. Part is driven by the suicide of a boy from a nearby school, the ex-boyfriend of one of Kim's classmates, which sparks a school-wide campaign to help the girls cope but doesn't seem to address anything meaningful about depression or grief at all.
Identity issues lurk in the background--what does it mean to be Asian? Queer? Overweight? Wiccan? Popular? A friend, a jerk?--but they're treated extraordinarily realistically, observed obliquely through Skim's eyes as she encounters them but left deliberately open, never resolved. It's one of the joys of a book like this that it gives you a chance to form your own opinion about Skim and her friends and measure the distance between Skim's teenage experiences and your own understanding of what they might mean.
You can find a brief description of the book here and a short excerpt here.
I thought Skim did an excellent job of conveying the indeterminate, changeable quality of the teen years and teen relationships--that shaky sense of looking for authenticity when you don't yet quite know who you are. Part of the plot is driven by Skim's relationship with her teacher, which she doesn't yet fully understand herself. Part is driven by the suicide of a boy from a nearby school, the ex-boyfriend of one of Kim's classmates, which sparks a school-wide campaign to help the girls cope but doesn't seem to address anything meaningful about depression or grief at all.
Identity issues lurk in the background--what does it mean to be Asian? Queer? Overweight? Wiccan? Popular? A friend, a jerk?--but they're treated extraordinarily realistically, observed obliquely through Skim's eyes as she encounters them but left deliberately open, never resolved. It's one of the joys of a book like this that it gives you a chance to form your own opinion about Skim and her friends and measure the distance between Skim's teenage experiences and your own understanding of what they might mean.
You can find a brief description of the book here and a short excerpt here.