Saturday, September 24, 2005

Summer of Love by Debbie Drechsler
Or see her other artwork at: http://www.sonic.net/~debdrex/
In Summer of Love, we meet Lily Maier, age thirteen, just moved into a "stupid," "ugly" house that looks like all the others. With a mostly absent father and a mother with two small children to watch, Lily has little to do with her family short of getting into near-comical spats with her slightly younger sister. "Summer of Love" moves along as Lily navigates new friends and new feelings of love while trying not be outcast or gain a bad reputation.
Drawn originally as a 5 part series called Nowhere this has been put together as a interesting graphic novel of first experiences. It is painful yet endearing to watch Lily as she tries to fit in and yet have her own voice. The drawings are not in black and white but rather green and brown kind of like pistachio ice cream.