Author Mariko Tamaki and illustrator Rosemary Valero-O’Connell bring to life a sweet and spirited tale of young love in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, a graphic novel that asks us to consider what happens when we ditch the toxic relationships we crave to embrace the healthy ones we need.
Laura Dean, the most popular girl in high school, was Frederica Riley's dream girl: charming, confident, and SO cute. There's just one problem: Laura Dean is maybe not the greatest girlfriend.
Reeling from her latest break up, Freddy's best friend, Doodle, introduces her to the Seek-Her, a mysterious medium, who leaves Freddy some cryptic parting words: break up with her. But Laura Dean keeps coming back, and as their relationship spirals further out of her control, Freddy has to wonder if it's really Laura Dean that's the problem. Maybe it's Freddy, who is rapidly losing her friends, including Doodle, who needs her now more than ever.
Fortunately for Freddy, there are new friends, and the insight of advice columnists like Anna Vice to help her through being a teenager in love.
www.loveinpanels.com/comics/laura-dean-keeps-breaking-up-with-me
Two timelines. Second chances. One love.
A ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together.
Two girls meet in boarding school and fall deeply in love―only to learn the pain of loss.
With interwoven timelines and stunning art, award-winning graphic novelist Tillie Walden creates an inventive world, breathtaking romance, and an epic quest for love.
Tillie Walden has written a GIANT queer space opera that manages to be quiet and tense at the same time.
The story is told in two timelines, past and present, with a corresponding color change. The worldbuilding is fascinating, with the characters traveling through space to rebuilt various historic sites. The character development is also detailed, and though it's a little hard to sink into, with so many characters and two timelines, the payoff is worth it.
This book is over 500 pages, so when I say it's big? I mean it. It's sort of YA, sort of not, but it's definitely an f/f romance.
Ignatz Award winner Tillie Walden’s Spinning is a powerful graphic memoir that captures what it’s like to come of age, come out, and come to terms with leaving behind everything you used to know.
It was the same every morning. Wake up, grab the ice skates, and head to the rink while the world was still dark.
Weekends were spent in glitter and tights at competitions. Perform. Smile. And do it again.
She was good. She won. And she hated it.
For ten years, figure skating was Tillie Walden’s life. She woke before dawn for morning lessons, went straight to group practice after school, and spent weekends competing at ice rinks across the state. Skating was a central piece of her identity, her safe haven from the stress of school, bullies, and family. But as she switched schools, got into art, and fell in love with her first girlfriend, she began to question how the close-minded world of figure skating fit in with the rest of her life, and whether all the work was worth it given the reality: that she, and her friends on the team, were nowhere close to Olympic hopefuls. The more Tillie thought about it, the more Tillie realized she’d outgrown her passion—and she finally needed to find her own voice.
With a whopping 400 pages, this book is something of a coming-of-age tome. With a spare, sketchlike style, Tillie Walden tells the story of her life as an ice skating child and teen.
Chapters are named after skating moves, a short description of the action mirroring the events of the story. Through skating, we see Tillie's yearning for acceptance and love: from other girls, from her coaches, from her family, from herself. Walden doesn't shy away from showing us her first love, her bouts of depression, and an assault by her SAT tutor. She lets readers feel the fear, heartbreak, and relief that she experiences while coming out as a teen.
While I spent about half of the book wondering "why the hell is she still skating if it makes her this miserable," Walden does answer that question. The "why" is inextricably tied in with Tillie's own struggle with self-acceptance and her need for approval. Even when she's being bullied at school, at the rink, at home, she still tries to put on a smile and do what is expected of her. This pushes her through skating, through middle school, through concealing her first relationship.
This is not a book for answers, however. Tillie's not perfect and doesn't pretend to be. She acknowledges that she might have saved everyone a lot of trouble by quitting skating earlier, and that she relied on one of her skating friends for a lot of support and friendship that she never really reciprocated. Rather than providing answers, this memoir offers readers a chance to consider the sacrifices we make for the things we could leave behind, and the confusing freedom that comes from breaking with routine and stepping into the unknown.