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Summary
Summary
Sydney seems like a normal 15-year-old freshman. She hangs out underneath the bleachers, listens to music in her friend's car, and gets into arguments with her annoying little brother -- but she also has a few secrets she's only shared in her diary. Like how she's in love with her best friend Dina, the bizarreness of her father's death, and those painful telekinetic powers that keep popping up at the most inopportune times. In this collection of the self-published minicomic series, Forsman expertly channels the teenage ethos in a style that evokes classic comic strips while telling a powerful story about the intense, and sometimes violent, tug of war between trauma and control.
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
Fifteen-year-old Syd feels totally out of place. She's skinny but not "hot-skinny," she's dealing with the death of her father in silence, and her best friend (with whom Syd is in love) is dating a homophobic bully. Syd's guidance counselor gives her a diary in which to vent her frustration, but Syd has another outlet for her anger. When her rage boils over, she can't help but telekinetically inflict pain on others. And when her powers go too far, the teen must face the consequences. While the simply drawn, round-headed characters in Forsman's story are reminiscent of the kids in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, Syd's exploits could not be further from sweet schoolyard pranks. She treats sex and drug use with frank indifference, and the jarringly bleak conclusion firmly cements this story as a starkly depressing tale. Forsman's avoidance of the all-too-familiar teenage redemption story is refreshing but certainly not for the faint of heart. VERDICT A frank and refreshing take on teenage dissatisfaction for older young adults who are mature enough to handle an unhappy ending.-Anna Murphy, Berkeley Carroll School, Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Forsman (The End of the Fucking World) draws heavily on the aesthetics of classic Popeye comics in this dark tale of adolescence. Sydney is an apathetic and depressed 15-year-old girl, tasked by her school guidance counselor with keeping a journal to help sort out her feelings. This allows for pitch-perfect unreliable narration to run over visual depictions of events. Sydney's troubles are easily relatable: fights with her mother, grief and guilt over her father's death, a crush on her best friend, questions about her sexuality, and experiments with drugs. But Sydney is also burdened with a terrible power. Her rage manifests as a shooting pain which she can direct at others, causing nosebleeds, migraine headaches, and worse. She has to live through the pain right along with her victims, but sometimes that seems worth it. The pages are drawn with a scratchy quill pen line, with occasional subtle grays interrupting the harsh black and white. As with Forsman's best work, it's another troubling yet poetic exploration of young adults working through their mental pain via its physical projection. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
