Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie

This may be me being cynical, I'm sorry to say. And that's not anything a nice, brand-new YA graphic novel needs. But I am struck by the way that memoir has so taken over YA comics that everything else bends to that format - even a book like this, which is entirely fictional.

Pearl is the story of Amy, a Japanese-American girl growing up in Hawaii in 1941. The book doesn't say exactly how old she is, but I'm going to guess around twelve - old enough to take a long trip by herself, young enough to still be a kid, just the right age for a book like this. And Pearl reads as if Amy was a real person, telling us her story - I was initially surprised when we got a "1941" caption, since I thought it would be a modern-day story about discovering her heritage. (Sometimes not reading the publicity material is a bad idea!)

Amy narrates the book, first telling the story of her great-grandmother, a late 19th century pearl-diver from Okinawa who gives the book its title and provides some parallax to Amy's story, and then quickly brings her family story up to her time. Now, I read this as an uncorrected proof, and it was obvious in a few places that panels were missing or FPO - some other pages seemed to not have the final color/tone in place. So anything else I write about here might also have changed: what I saw was an early, not-quite-finished version.

So if I say that Amy's narration is mostly short and factual, evocative rather than digging into her emotions, know that might have changed a bit. Probably not radically - I don't expect Pearl's text doubled or tripled in size - but especially at major moments, it might be a little more personal in the final version than the one I read.

Writer Sherri L. Smith puts us in Amy's shoes without exactly putting us in her head - we follow her throughout, but see her mostly from outside, as things happen to her. Pearl is largely the story of things that happen to Amy - major, world-historical events - that she has no control over and is just swept along by. I might have been hoping for somewhat more choice on Amy's part, which isn't entirely realistic for her age and time and place.

Comics are at least half pictures, though, and artist Christine Norrie's art is excellent at storytelling, with a particularly good eye for body language and the telling image. (I don't know how she worked with Smith on this book, so the visual storytelling could easily have been partially or mostly from Smith, if she did thumbnails or a panel-by-panel script.) So we don't get lots of words about how Amy feels and what she does, but we do see that, and can quickly tell.

I don't want to get into all the details - it's a quick read, the kind of comic where the pictures carry a lot of the weight - but Amy goes on what's supposed to be a few-months trip to visit her family in Japan, in the fall of 1941. And her family lives near Hiroshima. The young audience that Pearl is mostly aimed at won't necessarily know the significance of "fall of 1941" and "Hiroshima," but I think anyone reading this post will.

Amy spends the war in Japan. We see it from her point of view - limited, contingent, precise. She's put to work, goes through travails, learns about what's happening to her parents back in the USA. Smith and Norrie aren't quite telling the whole story of the Pacific War here, but they are trying to get through all of the high points that would realistically relate to a Japanese-American girl in Japan.

The art is always evocative, closely focused on Amy and what she sees. There's a sequence of pages, near the end, with real power and heft, and other stretches of beauty and energy, such as the opening with Amy's ancestor diving for pearls. It is a lovely book, thoughtful and visually appealing, with a somewhat minimalist text appropriate for the audience. It's not quite what I thought it would be, but that's entirely on me not paying enough attention up front.