School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-In this poignant memoir, Thrash examines a pivotal summer, marked by first love, self-discovery, and some difficult realizations. At age 15, Maggie returned to Camp Bellflower for Girls, a Christian camp located in Kentucky that she'd been attending for years, and fell in love with Erin, an older counselor. She encountered hostility from narrow-minded fellow campers and adults alike, both for her same-sex attraction and for her general refusal to toe the line when she proved to be a more skilled marksman than another girl. Although she long aspired to be named Honor Girl (a distinction that each year went to the girl who most exemplified the camp's spirit), she soon began to see her seemingly fun-filled, carefree world as tight and constricting and to realize she possessed the power to forge her own identity. Like Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, authors of This One Summer (First Second, 2014), Thrash has a gift for imbuing everyday, slice-of-life moments with deeper meaning, and she effortlessly conveys the awkwardness of coming into one's own. The tone is spot-on, varying from funny and quirky to quiet and contemplative, and Thrash seamlessly weaves in light, turn-of-the-millennium pop culture touchstones like the Backstreet Boys with darker historical references (the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy). Brief interludes of heartfelt, intimately wrought text appear alongside or in between panels, and the art is raw, sketchbooklike. Readers will feel as though they're opening a scrapbook or journal rather than a more formal autobiography. VERDICT An insightful and thought-provoking work.-Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Newcomer Thrash's graphic storytelling style, with its blank-eyed, manga-esque characters, might surprise readers accustomed to more polish. The good news is that her dialogue is so smart and snappy that a few pages in, they'll find it doesn't matter. Thrash portrays her 15-year-old self as a cynical Atlanta pre-cotillion deb who has been attending the same Appalachian sleepaway camp for years. Everything changes when a random caress from an older counselor, Erin, awakens a storm of desire. Maggie is unprepared for the turmoil of first love, and the camp is, to put it mildly, unwelcoming to teens questioning their sexuality. "Apparently they were on the tennis court," two campers gossip. "Blythe said they were pretty much doing it with a racket." Thrash writes with an intoxicating mix of candor, irony, and fresh passion. Much of the memoir's piquancy comes from the collisions between the camp's ideal of Southern womanhood, the campers' clannishness, and Maggie's faith in herself as she becomes, incongruously, the camp's best rifle shot. This is the kind of memoir that stays with readers for days. Ages 14-up. Agent: Stephen Barr, Writers House. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
This graphic memoir traces Thrash's transformative final summer of sleepaway camp, during which she falls for a counselor, comes out, and weathers the mixed response. The muted pastels of Thrash's loose-lined watercolor-pencil and pen illustrations reinforce a contemplative tone, and teenage Maggie's inner journey is heartfelt and thoughtfully drawn. However, substantial textual "voice-overs" skew the balance between action and retrospection. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Thrash chronicles one monumental summer at an all-girls' camp where she experienced her gut-wrenching first love. Every summer, Maggie, an Atlanta native, attends Camp Bellflower, an all-girls' camp in Kentucky, complete with tents, shooting, and Civil War re-enactments that have been a camp tradition for nearly 100 years. The summer that she turns 15, however, she falls in love for the first time. She meets Erin, a 19-year-old counselor who studies astronomy and plays guitar. Her summer is filled with the usual camp melodrama, although along with the everyday banalities, Maggie must try to hide what she's feeling toward Erin. Rumors thrum throughout the camp about girls who are whispered to be lesbians, leading to their eventual ostracism; Maggie, though honest with both herself and a confidante, tries to avoid her own social exile. Thrash perfectly captures all the feelings of an adolescent first love: the insecurities, the awkwardness, and self-doubts along with the soaring, intense highs of proximity. Thrash's remembrances are evinced with clear, wide-eyed illustrations colored with a dreamily vibrant palette. She has so carefully and skillfully captured a universal momentthe first time one realizes that things will never be the samethat readers will find her story captivating. A luminescent memoir not to be missed. (Graphic memoir. 13 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Camp Bellflower is obsessed with tradition. Everyone wears a uniform, chooses the same activities every year, makes the same off-the-wall silly jokes, and engages in the same petty meanness, and that's just fine with Thrash, who notes: I was used to environments where it was important for everyone to be the same. Only this time, something different clicks on in 15-year-old Thrash, and it manifests in other changes as she tries on the person she wants to be. In loose, naive-style, watercolor line drawings, Thrash recounts the summer she realized she is a lesbian and the halting moments of off-limits, quietly intense (though chaste) affection she shares with camp counselor Erin. Thrash finds both heartwarming support from her friends and smarmy disapproval from adults in the southern camp, and although she doesn't deny her burgeoning feelings, her revelation doesn't result in easy confidence, either. Though the understated artwork might not appeal to all readers, this honest, raw, and touching graphic memoir will resonate with teens coming to terms with identities of all stripes, regardless of sexual orientation.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT THE START of every summer session deep in the Kentucky Appalachians, Camp Bellflower celebrates one camper chosen to be the Honor Girl. She is the female ideal, representing the noble qualities the camp aims to foster in its generations of girls. Fifteen-year-old Maggie Thrash is a Bellflower veteran, an old hand at the hokey traditions of the camp. She doesn't bat an eye at the candlelit Honor Girl ceremony, or the daily Civil War reenactments (which consist of two groups of girls screaming "GRAY!" and BLUE!" at each other). She has her friends, her ankle leash to keep from sleepwalking, her entire pleasantly familiar summer stretching out ahead of her. Until one fateful lice inspection by an older counselor triggers a romantic awakening, in the last location she would have chosen. In this graphic memoir, Thrash writes with confidence and skill remarkable for a debut. An alumna of the online-teenage girl wonderland Rookie, she off-sets heartache with sharp humor, sincere but never cloying. Period details, such as Maggie's fondness for Kevin Richardson (the brooding Backstreet Boy) and a brand-new Harry Potter book making the rounds, place the story at the turn of the millennium, though the feelings involved are timeless. In addition to being an ace writer and apparently an ace rifle shot, Thrash shows an impressive grasp of the language of comics. Page layouts are clean and clever. A pair of clasped female hands is juxtaposed with an "Everyday Values" sign on a small-town Walmart. Though simply drawn, the artwork is by no means lazy. There is thought in every watercolored panel, the spare expressions and body language filling in the blanks when the characters aren't speaking. This is what comics are for. Erin, the new object of Maggie's affections, is mysterious in a way all former teenagers will recognize. The inscrutable older cool girl, she makes us wonder alongside Maggie if she's really looking at us, if the gift of a hemp bracelet means what we hope it means. There are dreams of a nighttime rendezvous, longing looks from behind trees, arms brushing against each other in a tent full of people. It's sweet and obsessive and dead on - this is what it looks like when 15-year-old weirdos fall in love. Though Maggie is terrified of being ostracized, as previous gay campers were, her friends are surprisingly sympathetic. They keep her secret and egg her on as she awkwardly pursues Erin. It's refreshing to be reminded of the plain and open way teenage girls can be good to each other. This is not "Mean Girls." There are more interesting things to worry about. The only exception is Libby, Maggie's rival at the rifle range, who is less concerned with Maggie being gay and more wrapped up in her own competitiveness and petty insecurities. But even when we're exhilarated, 90 percent sure that yes, Erin really does like Maggie back, we remember where we are. However progressive Maggie's friends might be, Camp Bellflower's decades-old strictures will not be challenged. For all the good that comes of teaching girls to love thy neighbor, it only counts if it's the right kind of love. As the head counselor tells Maggie in a heart-breaking page: "It's a place where girls can be totally innocent and free, maybe for the last time in their lives. Don't ruin it for everyone." Things can't end well for Maggie and Erin at Bellflower. But would it be any better outside the bubble of summer camp? Like a Southern Brigadoon, Camp Bellflower sets off and intensifies Maggie's relationship with Erin, then disappears into the mist, taking the magic with it. Thrash captures the way summer camp is exempt from time and reality. Things stay there, wrapped up in the smells of old canvas and canoe sheds, even as you desperately try to take them with you. One fateful lice inspection triggers Maggies romantic awakening, in the last location she would have chosen. VERA BROSGOL is the author of the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning "Anya's Ghost."
