Found it on the library book cart at Pride (yay!!). Kind of disturbing, and sometimes I couldn't tell if it was intentional or not. There are very few black people (and no real black characters), and every time a black person appears in a panel they're yelling or angry or intimidating or outright scary---I'm pretty sure that wasn't intentional. Also some unexpected homophobia ('butches are icky and gross eww')---maybe it was being lampshaded? And weird consent stuff, which Schrag didn't directly address, but I was fairly sure that she was trying to portray it in an honest and self-critical light.

Overall, I think I didn't connect strongly because I didn't have any messy stupid messed-up high school relationships. I know I'm in the minority there. (I was a complete classic naiive nerd---shocking, I know.) I don't have a strong desire to go back and read the first one, but I think I will look out for the next one along, since the improvements in art and storytelling were so vast from beginning to end of this volume. ( )

Potential covers the later high-school years in Schrag's extended comics biography. It's pretty uneven, and naturally a little naval-gazey at times. But it is very earnest, and feels authentic. While it may not be the greatest comcis, or the greatest story, I think it really succeeds on its own terms, and I feel that that is to be commended.

Also - Ariel Schrag's high school experience was a lot more racey than mine. ( )

Potential by Ariel Schrag is a graphic memoir of the author's sexual awakening in ninth grade. Her high school comics were originally released the year after the year covered.

The school year is a string of different relationships, hoping to find that ONE that would help her define herself, her true "potential." But it doesn't go well for her. There's a lot of partying and skipping school and other idiotic teenage stuff.

I normally enjoy this type of graphic novel &mdash a school aged memoir by a woman. But this one never grabbed hold of me. Part of it was the emphasis on sex, smoking, and skipping school. While I certainly had crushes in 9th grade I wasn't living my day to day on the goal of getting some! Basically, she paints herself as very one sided so that her only personality traits are young, sex obessed lesbian. YAWN.

Finally there's the artwork. OK, I get that she was young when she drew these. But there's just not enough there to distinguish between the many different characters. The artwork here was more a distraction than a benefit to the memoir. ( )

Junior year. Shrag hits it out of the park again. She's so honest, so immediate, so painfully real. ( )

Teenage tempestuous relationships. I thought for a while that Schrag couldn't draw well, until I read her dream sequences, in which she uses a much more lifelike drawing style, as compared to the cartooniness of the main story. Maybe she's done it this way to highlight the exaggerated drama of high school, and the strange insight one can get from dreams? I enjoyed it, and it's neat to see her development from Awkward and Definition. ( )