Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2007)

Starred Review How bad was it in junior high? Comics artists visualize the anguish in this honest, acutely perceptive compendium of cartoon black humor. Editor Schrag, who relived her high-school years in several books, including Potential (2000), adds herself to an impressive roundup of artists, including Aaron Reiner (Spiral-Bound, 2004), Lauren Weinstein (Girl Stories, 2005), and Daniel Clowes, whose comics were adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie, Ghost World. Occasionally repetitious, the comics nevertheless hit the mark in terms of emotional content, whether the subject is making friends, embarrassing parents, or suffering through a first date. Wildly disparate in style, the black, white, and gray-tone artwork ranges from Eric Enright's minimalist contribution, with figures that look like toddler toys, and Jace Smith's freewheeling, bug-eyed monster-kid comic to Joe Matt's stark, crisply drawn contribution. Kids going through adolescence will relate; so will those who have come out on the other side.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

If you can survive junior high, you can survive anything!” That's cartoonist Jace Smith's inspirational promise in this collection of 17 comics covering those universally awkward middle-school years. The agonies depicted are the kind that leaves scars: betrayal over Spin-the-Bottle, schoolyard taunting, hazing by cheerleaders and wedgies aplenty. Every reader will have something to readily identify with: Dash Shaw's young hero wonders if he'll ever find love despite having a face full of zits. Gabrielle Bell's heroine wears the same clothes every day, earning her the nickname “Stinky.” Lauren Weinstein's Becky tops off a miserable stay at a horse camp by getting her period. The stories range from crudely drawn but deeply felt to truly literary, such as Daniel Clowes's tale of an introverted boy's summer with his grandparents. Editor Shrag contributes two of the strongest stories. In one, girlish cattiness earns karmic retribution with a bus ride to a bad part of town. In another, the hapless heroine chooses to carry around her own poop in her backpack rather than admit a social faux pas. The situations are often hilarious in retrospect, but the contributors make their emotional painfulness at the time fully apparent. This collection should help those in the midst of similar social travails realize that they, too, will someday look back and laugh at it all. Ages 12-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

School Library Journal (Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2007)

Gr 7-9 Multiple stories of life during middle school are told in an indie comix style that might appeal to the zine crowd in terms of raw art, construction, and subject matter. Common themes of alienation, adjustment, popularity, and burgeoning sexual drives can be found in the various taleswith accompanying charged languagebut what is most striking is their collective open-ended lack of structure and conclusion. While the stories take transition and formative awareness to heart, the recurring vignette format prevents most of the offerings from providing much in the way of a discernable message or point beyond the evocative emotional content. The volume subsequently has a therapeutic vibe, with the storieseven while not contemporary in most of their settingsexisting simply to show that the situations in which readers may find themselves are common. But the sharing seems less helpful for prospective readers than it seems purgative to the contributors, as little solace can be found in moments that hang on the page without any clear direction. The artwork is quite varied, but does exemplify that there are many ways of expressing oneself, and that traditional comic-book structures can be adapted or subverted in order to create a personal storytelling technique. In this fashion, the book does more artistically to demonstrate the potential of individual expression than the generic themes and the somewhat meandering plotting. Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH

Voice of Youth Advocates

The middle school characters in these short comics survive first loves, name calling, bizarre fantasies, cheap summer camp, and unpredictable friendships. Authors with little reputation rub shoulders with new comics stars and at least one legend to tell stories of angst and occasional triumph. The art styles of these comics vary widely, from Joe Matt's clear, bold lines and heavy ink to Jace Smith's intentionally claustrophobic messiness and Eric Enright's moving abstraction. The book also includes the vaguely hideous style that Dan Clowes has also used so effectively in Ghost World collected by Fantagraphics in 2001. It is nice to see Clowes's influential "alternative comics" style next to efforts by artists such as Jim Hoover and Robyn Chapman, who work in newer popular styles. The themes and storytelling structures are not as varied as the artwork, and at times that makes reading the next story difficult. The stories are aimed squarely at middle school readers, many of whom will find the queue of tales about ugliness and traitorous friends so close to reality that the stories become comforting, but other readers will be turned off by the gloom and avoidance of closure that ends so many of these pieces. The self-absorption of the characters, too, will come across either as familiar and welcoming or familiar and tedious. These brief tales succeed in communicating the unrelenting social pressure of middle school, but they are most powerful when they are also able to show characters escaping their awkwardness and self-absorption, if only briefly.-Joe Sutliff Sanders.