All Together Now by Hope Larson

There's something deeply pure about a middle-book about middle-schoolers. The characters are in a point of their lives where they're growing and changing - not still the people they were as kids, and not even the teenagers they will be in another year or two, much less the actual adults they will eventually become - and the story is similarly middle, starting from another book it hopes we've already read and handing off at the end to a book the author may not have even planned out yet.

It's very thematically appropriate, is what I'm saying.

That's how I think about All Together Now, Hope Larson's new graphic novel for 2020 and a sequel to 2018's All Summer Long. It picks up soon after the end of the previous book: Bina is still thirteen, it's still the same year, and she still wants to write and play music. But the entanglements and problems are different, because it's not summer anymore - All Together Now begins in September and runs through nearly the end of the year. So Bina is back in school, has formed a band with her new friend Darcy, and hardly sees her neighbor and one-time best friend Austin, who has a punishing travel-soccer schedule.

So the Bina-Darcy band needs a drummer, and gets one, which changes everything, and keeps changing things. And Austin eventually circles back, with a different opinion of Bina than he had before.

Things change. They can change really quickly when you're thirteen.

Together is the same kind of book as Summer: episodic, quiet rather than flashy, introspective rather than dramatic. It's about how Bina feels about what's happening as much as it's about the things that happen...and, to be honest, Bina isn't really sure how she feels about the band-drama and the next-door-neighbor drama a lot of the time.

Books about people this age often have the young people bemoaning the changes, and wanting things to stay the way they were, forever - Bina had a bit of that, in Summer. She's still not thrilled with all of the changes now, but I think she's happier, or maybe just resigned, about the changes. Maybe she's starting to see the places the changes could take her, and those are thrilling and frightening, like all adult life is. That's a good sign for her: life is change, and the earlier people realize that, the better off they will be.

All Together Now is another fine, deep, naturalistic graphic novel by Hope Larson, following a long string like Chiggers and Mercury. I'm not as plugged into that world, so I hope the reason I don't hear about her work as much is because I'm not part of that conversation, and not because she's little-known. This book, in particular, should be in every middle-school library in the country: it has a lot to say to other actual and aspirational thirteen-year-olds.