Roaming

It was interesting, although not my favorite work by either of them. I feel like I remember working through similar situations at that age, and I appreciated the messy realism of that.

this was another one of those “oh shit, i'm out of renewals and it's due back at the library in a week, better get cracking” kind of reads.

while i do love me some tamaki collabs, i put off reading this (in general, not just during my loan period) because its jacket synopsis didn't grab me, and an initial quick flip of the pages didn't do much to dissuade me from thinking this was a messy late teens/early twenties type of book. which it is, but it takes place in 2009, so it's like my generation's chaos, right? (give or take a small handful of years.) like, i know these characters, i know these archetypes, i've probably had or been around very similar conversations and wreaked similar havoc—nostalgia mode activated.

i originally found the ending a bit underwhelming, as we're conditioned to want justice and a neat resolution, but i think how it played out was true to life. i loooved jillian tamaki's illustrations throughout, and the use of flickr references of NYC back then. the uses of flashback were really well done, from recounting conversations early on (retelling a line or two from another character) to visual transformations on the page in the final chapter or so. and dialogue from mariko tamaki was subtle and deftly youthful without being juvenile and was also so very new york.

overall, really well done, even (especially?) the bitch from a long line of bitches that i wanna sucker punch.

In the acknowledgments, it says that “the events of the story are both too real and entirely fictional”, and I think that's an excellent summary of the book. The characters feel very lived in and real, and it really feels like you're reading a slice of life. Loved it!

I really enjoyed the fluid and wild graphic style of this auto fictional graphic novel. Love the Tamaki cousins work.