A review by wickerchicken
Forest Hills Bootleg Society by Nicole Goux, Dave Baker

5.0

This is one of the best coming of age stories I've read in a while. It follows a friend group in the 2000’s and their attempts to sell bootleg anime at their school. What I found so compelling about it was the way in which the authors chose to break the traditions of what you would expect to see in a graphic novel in order to better serve their characters. This breaking of tradition is noticeable in how the sequential art was occasionally broken up by paragraphs that gave insight into the lives of the main characters. This gave them much more depth than they would have had otherwise and made me feel much more connected to them.
The story felt very honest in its telling of friendships, life, and loneliness. The ending in particular made me wish for it to be a little less honest, but it made me feel something, and I think that’s more important to an ending than complete reader satisfaction.