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The Summer of Love
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Widely acknowledged as one of the great female cartoonists for her expressive and candid style, Drechsler ’ s GN is an achingly true portrait of life as a girl. Lili and her sister Pearl encounter all the triumphs and cruelties of teenage life when they move to a boring suburb and they search
… More »Widely acknowledged as one of the great female cartoonists for her expressive and candid style, Drechsler ’ s GN is an achingly true portrait of life as a girl. Lili and her sister Pearl encounter all the triumphs and cruelties of teenage life when they move to a boring suburb and they search for new friends. Drechsler ’ s style is always arresting and surprisingly revealing. Her dialogue rings out with the subtlety and candor of teenage voices raised in anger, mockery and joy.
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Publishers Weekly
It's the late 1960s, and Lily Maier's family has just moved to a new tract house in the nondescript suburban town of Woodland. The book begins like any teen novel: Lily explores the neighborhood; fights with her younger sister, Pearl; and meets the local kids. Lily's initial skepticism about the move dissolves when she encounters a boy who seems smarter and more mature than the rest. When their physical relationship intensifies, though, he backs off in the inexplicable way boys sometimes do. Hurt and confused, Lily reluctantly ends up making out with another guy, who's crass and predatory and won't take no for an answer. On top of the boy problem, Lily discovers Pearl's romantic attachment to Kim, a neighborhood girl. Drechsler handles Kim and Pearl's sneak-off-and-kiss relationship, and Lily's response to it, with subtlety and sensitivity, adding another layer of emotional complexity to the story. She combines insight and empathy in this true-to-life portrayal of sexual awakening and budding introspection among teenagers. The book's brown-and-turquoise color scheme, with lots of hand-lettered dialogue, can be hard on the eyes, but the excellent page layouts overcome the problem. Drechsler's drawings capture teenagers' languid, seemingly uncomfortable postures girls lean and flirt, boys slouch awkwardly around them and her rendition of these moments are startlingly realistic. Drechsler successfully juxtaposes inchoate adolescent emotions against the square soulessness of 1960s suburbia. (Sept. 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Booklist
Drechsler's Daddy's Girl (1996) was a harrowing graphic novel about incest, but the largely autobiographical Summer of Love is as sweetly nostalgic as it is painful. Adolescent emotional turmoil is front and center in the life of ninth-grader Lily, whose family moves to a new community, where she must find her place in the high-school's pecking order. Although set in 1967, Lily's is a timelessly relevant story for Americans, at least, and Drechsler convincingly captures the angst, insecurities, and petty feuds typical of the teenage years. Lily's efforts to make new friends as she experiences her sexual awakening unfold slowly, with very little drama. Yet Drechsler shows how trivial events assume unrealistic importance. Her simple style resembles a refined version of that of Lynda Barry, who also limns the world of sensitive adolescent girls. Green and brown overlays on the structural lines, though applied a bit too heavily, prove an attractive alternative to standard alternative-comics black-and-white. Every former misunderstood adolescent should be able to relate to this compelling work. --Gordon Flagg
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