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A review by rereader33
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki
5.0
This should be required reading for everyone, especially young people. Topics include sexuality, abortion, infidelity, and others I'm sure I've overlooked. Seriously, this graphic novel is amazing, from the story, the characters, the writing, the artwork, everything. Freddy's growth from a purely selfish asshole to compassionate and sympathetic friend was great and believable. Laura Dean was a toxic and awful human being and seeing her get her just desserts at the end was so satisfying.
Something I want to discuss is that the teenagers in this graphic novel behave more their age than YA novels. What I mean is they're not made out to be flawless people or at least wholly good people. Each character has significant flaws that are realistic yet not all-consuming, like Freddy's selfishness, which shows ugly sides of their personalities without shame. I understand that most literature is meant to be a form of escapism and people want to follow good guy protagonists, but so many YA novels feature characters that are either so flawless they're hard to take seriously or so flawless they're boring. I'm personally more invested in characters with defining character flaws (I was going to list all of my favorite anime characters as examples, but that would take forever so just take my word for it) because watching them overcome their struggles WHILE MAINTAINING THEIR FLAWS is exceptionally rewarding. I just realized I kind of got off topic, but what I'm saying is that what I admired about this graphic novel was that the author was not afraid to make her characters unlikable because teenagers in real life are sometimes obnoxious and unlikable. So, yeah, sorry for the rant but that's effectively what I was trying to say.
Anyway, I loved this graphic novel, I would be so damn happy if everybody read it, please give it a chance it's definitely worth it.
Something I want to discuss is that the teenagers in this graphic novel behave more their age than YA novels. What I mean is they're not made out to be flawless people or at least wholly good people. Each character has significant flaws that are realistic yet not all-consuming, like Freddy's selfishness, which shows ugly sides of their personalities without shame. I understand that most literature is meant to be a form of escapism and people want to follow good guy protagonists, but so many YA novels feature characters that are either so flawless they're hard to take seriously or so flawless they're boring. I'm personally more invested in characters with defining character flaws (I was going to list all of my favorite anime characters as examples, but that would take forever so just take my word for it) because watching them overcome their struggles WHILE MAINTAINING THEIR FLAWS is exceptionally rewarding. I just realized I kind of got off topic, but what I'm saying is that what I admired about this graphic novel was that the author was not afraid to make her characters unlikable because teenagers in real life are sometimes obnoxious and unlikable. So, yeah, sorry for the rant but that's effectively what I was trying to say.
Anyway, I loved this graphic novel, I would be so damn happy if everybody read it, please give it a chance it's definitely worth it.