Debbie Drechsler

The Summer of Love by Debbie Drechsler is a roman à clef about the summer a pair of sisters with their parents moved to a new suburb. There's all the eye rolling drama of being a teenager in a new neighborhood.

There's Lili and Pearl. Pearl seems to adapt to the new situation but Lili just doesn't fit in. She has a crush on a boy but he's not interested. She misses her friends. She doesn't like the new house. She's bored. Her sister has a, GASP, girlfriend.

Boohoo. It's so hard being a white upper middle class Baby Boomer. Cry me a river.… (mais)

I read "The Summer of Love" straight after the disturbing autobiographical "Daddy's Girl" by the same author, which features the same characters when they were younger. Whereas "Daddy's Girl" depicts the tragic abuse Lily had to suffer on the hands of her father, none of it is present in "The Summer of Love", which concentrates on the more classic foes of coming of age in suburban America. Sadly, it is also a road much traveled in contemporary graphic fiction, and Debbie Drechsler's slightly caricatural style does not match the finesse of other authors such as Craig Thomson or Alison Bechdel. What's more, the brownish-greenish color scheme used here is reminiscent of those blue-red 3D images when read without the appropriate colored glasses and are tiresome in the long run.… (mais)

This very powerful autobiography in comic form relates the childhood of the author and the sexual abuse she suffered from her father. The struggles of the child to reconcile her deeply wounded self with the "normality" of her sisters and school friends are very aptly related. This book is the stunning result of a very courageous introspective process, and serves as a disturbing remainder of the untold atrocities suffered by children who shared the author's fate. This being said, I am not a great fan of Debbie Drechsler graphic art and was therefore unable to immerse myself in the story as much as I had wanted. I also regretted the abrupt end of the book, the lack of a more adult take on the situation and a possible confrontation with the perpetrator.… (mais)