Be That Way by Hope Larson

First off, this book is not autobiographical, as creator Hope Larson says on the first page of Be That Way. She's about two years younger than her heroine, for one thing. But it is a book about a young woman with artistic talent, growing up in the same town Larson did (Asheville, North Carolina) at about the same time, and apparently includes a lot of the real-world locations young Larson knew herself. So it's memoir-adjacent, at least.

Second: it's not "comics," exactly, as you might expect from Larson's prior work. It's a mixture of prose and illustration, with some comics sections. That's a format that has become pretty common - and very popular! - for younger readers, with Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and so on. But I don't think there have been many books for teens in this format, so Larson is staking out new ground that way. It's an interesting, flexible format - good for both introspection and imagistic moments - and it works well here, where Larson is presenting the story as the diary kept by her main character over one tumultuous year.

Christine is our narrator: that's her on the cover. After a brief intro at age 13 in late 1993, the book settles into her 1996 diary: she wants to be more "shiny," now that she's sixteen - she recently broke up with her first boyfriend Dave, and wants to basically do all the high school things: get a serious boyfriend, do well in school, have great friends, be part of something fun.

The last is already mostly there: Christine has been writing for the school paper, the Cougar Chronicle, since freshman year, and one of her two best friends, Paul, is also an editor there. Paul is dating Jennifer and has been for a long time; Christine resolutely declares she has no romantic interest in Paul and never will; he's just a great friend. Readers can decide for themselves where and how they've seen that before.

Christine's other best friend is Landry, who is the outgoing, gorgeous, more-than-a-little-wild counterpoint to Christine's mostly quiet and contained nature. This is another major thread of the novel, the push-pull of this friendship, with Landry always being big and dragging Christine along with her on her escapades, especially in the middle of the book, where's she's dating a college boy, Jason.

Another, more buried thread, is Christine's home life. She doesn't focus on it - what sixteen-year-old would? - but she's clearly living in a fancy neighborhood of rich people, like Landry and her next-door-neighbor Whit, and her family isn't rich.

Or isn't rich anymore. Her doctor father died in what seems to be early 1993, six months or so before the introduction. Her mother went back to work as a nurse, and the family doesn't seem to be doing badly - they just don't really fit into the neighborhood anymore, and their old friends seem to have quietly fallen away. Christine, as the oldest, has to take on some caring for her younger siblings, Brandon (about 12) and April (probably 2-4 years younger than that). We don't really see her younger siblings, because this is Christine's story, but they - and her mostly-at-work mother - influence how she lives and the space she has available for that life on every page.

Larson tells this story naturalistically, through Christine's diary entries. First the end of her junior year, then the summer, and then into the first half of senior year. She fights with Landry, deals with her relationship with Paul, gets her first job, has another boyfriend for a few months, and just goes through life: working on the school newspaper, doing assignments for art class, seeing movies, hanging out with the friends I've mentioned and others that I haven't.

In the end, Christine is in a good place, and we're happy for her - not just on the relationship side, which will be a big draw for the teen readers of this book, but also in thinking about what she wants to do with her life, where she can take her desire to draw and write things, what will come next as she looks on towards college.

I suspect there will be two main audiences for this book: first, the obvious one, teens, especially girls, especially girls who are interested in art and writing, who are in a spot like this right now or see it coming in a year or two. The other is women who were teens in the mid-90s, who can look back to this time in their lives, and feel the parallels strongly - Larson has a lot of emotionally resonant details here, some of which are Asheville-specific but most of which are just teenagery. I think this book will be familiar to a lot of people - a lot of it was resonant with me, and I'm a decade older than Larson, the opposite gender, and grew up a few thousand miles away.

If either of those things describe you, or describe someone you know well, you might want to take a look at Be That Way. Larson has been making excellent comics for a couple of decades now; this is something bigger, quirkier, and more interesting, but just as excellent.