The Summer of Love [Paperback]

It's the late 1960s, and Lily Maier's family has just moved to a new tract house in the nondescript suburban town of Woodland. The book begins like any teen novel: Lily explores the neighborhood; fights with her younger sister, Pearl; and meets the local kids. Lily's initial skepticism about the move dissolves when she encounters a boy who seems smarter and more mature than the rest. When their physical relationship intensifies, though, he backs off in the inexplicable way boys sometimes do. Hurt and confused, Lily reluctantly ends up making out with another guy, who's crass and predatory and won't take no for an answer. On top of the boy problem, Lily discovers Pearl's romantic attachment to Kim, a neighborhood girl. Drechsler handles Kim and Pearl's sneak-off-and-kiss relationship, and Lily's response to it, with subtlety and sensitivity, adding another layer of emotional complexity to the story. She combines insight and empathy in this true-to-life portrayal of sexual awakening and budding introspection among teenagers. The book's brown-and-turquoise color scheme, with lots of hand-lettered dialogue, can be hard on the eyes, but the excellent page layouts overcome the problem. Drechsler's drawings capture teenagers' languid, seemingly uncomfortable postures girls lean and flirt, boys slouch awkwardly around them and her rendition of these moments are startlingly realistic. Drechsler successfully juxtaposes inchoate adolescent emotions against the square soulessness of 1960s suburbia.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Drechsler's Daddy's Girl (1996) was a harrowing graphic novel about incest, but the largely autobiographical Summer of Love is as sweetly nostalgic as it is painful. Adolescent emotional turmoil is front and center in the life of ninth-grader Lily, whose family moves to a new community, where she must find her place in the high-school's pecking order. Although set in 1967, Lily's is a timelessly relevant story for Americans, at least, and Drechsler convincingly captures the angst, insecurities, and petty feuds typical of the teenage years. Lily's efforts to make new friends as she experiences her sexual awakening unfold slowly, with very little drama. Yet Drechsler shows how trivial events assume unrealistic importance. Her simple style resembles a refined version of that of Lynda Barry, who also limns the world of sensitive adolescent girls. Green and brown overlays on the structural lines, though applied a bit too heavily, prove an attractive alternative to standard alternative-comics black-and-white. Every former misunderstood adolescent should be able to relate to this compelling work. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

After several years of working as an illustrator, Debbie Drechsler decided to try another medium that would allow her a more intimate means of expression. In several starkly illustrated comic book stories, Drechsler wrote about deeply personal, often troubling themes, including childhood sexual abuse, and the troubles of a young girl growing up alienated from her surroundings. Drechsler's first comic strip was published in Drawn & Quarterly in 1992, and in the following year, her landmark, darkly-colored story, "Constellations", was published in The Best of Drawn & Quarterly. Her first book, Daddy's Girl, was published in 1996, and later that year her first regular comic book series, Nowhere, premeired. Drechsler was nominated for three 1997 Eisner Awards (including Best New Series for Nowhere) along with two 1997 Ignatz Awards, including Best New Talent. Foreign editions of her work have been recently published in France and Italy. Drechsler lives in Santa Rosa, California, where she is in the early planning stages of her next comic book story. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.