Sunday, December 15, 2013

Review: Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks

Friends with Boys--Faith Erin Hicks
February 2012 by First Second
220 pages--Goodreads

After years of homeschooling, Maggie is starting high school. It's pretty terrifying.

Maggie's big brothers are there to watch her back, but ever since Mom left it just hasn't been the same.

Besides her brothers, Maggie's never had any real friends before. Lucy and Alistair don't have lots of friends either. But they eat lunch with her at school and bring her along on their small-town adventures.

Missing mothers...distant brothers...high school...new friends... It's a lot to deal with. But there's just one more thing.

MAGGIE IS HAUNTED.






Friends with Boys is an excellent graphic novel about growing up. I can't really narrow the subject down more than that; it deals with friends and crushes and enemies and fathers and siblings and twins and mothers and fitting in and standing out and moving on and dealing with loss and new beginnings. For such a short novel, there was so much going on. Hicks perfectly captured the feel of high school: the isolation, the friendships, the crap "friends" put each other through.

I loved the illustration style. It fit perfectly with the story Hicks told and was deceptively simple. The illustrations were fun and quirky sometimes and deep and poignant at others. Hicks says so much with so little.

The ghost story was weaved in well. It wasn't over the top, as it easily could have been. It served as a way for Maggie to process and cope with all the stuff going on in her life, particularly her mom's abandonment of the family.

I picked up <i>Friends with Boys</i> expecting a quick, fun, fluffy contemporary story. It was fun, but it was also surprisingly deep. And as a bonus, one of my most reluctant readers loved it.

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