When I started down the wonderful path that is reading graphic novels last year, This One Summer by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki was one of the first works I checked out. Don't make me judge you for not picking it up. This is the best graphic novel you haven't read yet, kids. Now I just have to decide if I want to break it into two parts when I assign it, so we have some space to absorb it slowly, or if I should make the students read it in one go, just to feel the rush of "what the hell was that amazing thing" that I felt when it was over.
This is the most satisfying, absorbing reading experience I've had in a long time. I don't think I've ever read a graphic novel that so brazenly exists in subtext, that acts out the outsider-y repressed nature of its protagonist so artfully, absolutely refusing to divulge all the layers of its meaning on a first pass.
It's the kind of good that makes you realize as you're reading it that you're only getting a tenth of what's going on, and then when you put the book down it starts unfolding, like you're still reading it, and man is that a warm, strange, velvety feeling to have going on in your head. Man, I am so tired of reading every-graphic-novel-I-should-have-read-but-didn't in preparation for a course I start teaching in a month, but it was all completely worth it to read Skim.
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