All My Friends is a 2021 graphic novel by Hope Larson, aimed at tweens. (The copy I read has a library sticker to that effect right on the spine, in a classy sans-serif display font.) It follows 2018's All Summer Long and 2020's All Together Now. The first book was the story of one summer in the life of thirteen-year-old Los Angeles girl [1] Bina, as she started to get more serious about writing and playing music when her next-door best friend Austin went off to soccer camp. The second one continued both those plots, as Bina formed a band with two other girls and also had a single (unsuccessful) date with Austin.
Friends cover roughly the first half of the next year: Bina is now fourteen, which is not specifically remarked on. But this is a book about doing more, reaching out more, expanding and trying to continue - even when some people around you want to curtail that. She's got a different band - there was serious Band Drama in Together, but that's smoothed over now, and her former bandmates are friendly with Bina - which is getting serious.
The band is Fancy Pink, and it's another three-piece: Bina on lead guitar, vocals, and songwriting, with bassist Lora and drummer Kesi. (Fiction tends to like small, tight bands, so as to avoid having too many characters to keep track of.) They have their first show early in the book, opening for a band of slightly older kids named Anne Surly. (From the evidence here, the LA band scene is entirely the realm of people not yet old enough to drive.)
This leads to music-career drama: first their best song is licensed for a TV show theme. (Larson elides the details here in a sneaky way - Fancy Pink must have recorded this song professionally in some studio, but later in the book they say they have no experience in how to record music.) Their parents are uneasy, but allow this.
They don't allow, though, when a label gets in touch and wants Fancy Pink to record an EP for them. The girls are Too Young, say the parents, and the music industry is Too Much.
The three bandmates hate this decision and will accept it only as much as they absolutely have to. Which means they obviously can't sign with that label without parental approval, but they can make plans to raise the money and record an EP on their own. They don't run any of this plan past their parents, who they assume would nix it. (And I agree with that: if I were one of these girls, I'd have been making arch comments about "the bad nursing home" to my parents by this point.)
Fancy Pink practices, writes songs, gets better. Bina has a date or two with Cooper, the fifteen-year-old frontman of Anne Surly. She doesn't like-like him - he has too many phony cruel friends - but they stay friends afterward. She also comes to think about Austin, who circles on the outer edges of this book, more and more.
It all comes together at a semi-secret benefit concert in a basement one Saturday afternoon, where Bina plays a brand-new song she wrote about Austin. (Tween drama! In all its forms.)
All My Friends is a fun book that closes out the trilogy well: it's very much a book for tweens, all longing to hold hands and be famous, so it might feel small and juvenile to some older readers. But if you can engage with it on its level, it has the energy and enthusiasm of youth, which is no bad thing.
[1] Thirteen is already fairly old for me to feel comfortable calling a young woman "girl," but it's also a bit young to call her "young woman." Life is complicated. (And I read too many 20th century books by men - or books by 20th century men - that use "girl" to mean "potentially available hottie" to be comfortable with any use of the word, frankly.)
No comments:
Post a Comment