tl;dr, this is the sweetest book I’ve read all year, and I see no prospect of any book knocking it out of that spot in the back half of the year, and you absolutely must read it
After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to be an unreliable jerkface, Freddy carries on wanting her, even at the expense of her other relationships.
I love this book so much that it’s going to be difficult for me to describe it dispassionately, but I shall try. My primary memory from reading This One Summer is that the Tamaki cousins, unlike very, very, very many adults, have not forgotten what it is like to be a kid. Having read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I stand by that position. It’s one of these universal being-a-teenager stories done with extraordinary sensitivity and loveliness: Freddy is in love with someone flighty and unavailable, and she keeps on thinking that if she does everything just right (or maybe is a slightly different person), the relationship will become what she wants it to be.
(Spoiler for that relationship: It won’t.)
Rosemary Valero O’Connell’s art for this book is exceptional and contributes so much to the mood and texture of the story, including my position that these creators remember being a teenager. She makes use of numerous stage-setting panels in between those with dialogue, so we get a sense of these kids, the things on their bedroom floors, their diner orders, their small gestures and mannerisms. Here’s a panel of Freddy and her best friend Doodle sitting in class, preoccupied.
The cat pencil case? The clock in the corner? Doodle chewing on the end of her hoodie’s’s drawstrings? I remember this so much.
Laura Dean is, if I may say so, an actually perfect character in a high school novel. The story is framed in letters that Freddy writes to a national advice columnist, and those letters frame the art to show us the lens Freddy’s viewing Laura Dean through. Oh my God it’s so good, how vividly the art and voiceovers show you that Freddy’s always, always got her eye on Laura Dean, whether Laura Dean is flirting with someone else at the opposite end of the cafeteria, or smooching Freddy casually in the hall between classes. There’s some shit Laura Dean pulls at the very end that I won’t spoil because it’s the most perfect un-operatic high-school-asshole careless shittiness imaginable. But just to give you a sense, here she is blowing off Freddy with style and charisma (click to embiggen):
The hardest thing about teenagerhood — if you set aside all the regular-life hard things that happen during high school, which are the same regular-life hard things that happen after high school (illness, family illness, death, money troubles, friend troubles) except you’re too young to have context for what’s normal and you have virtually no power to affect outcomes so you’re just fucking swept along by every tidal wave that happens by — is learning to set aside what everyone else wants you to be, and sorting out what you want you to be. And that’s fundamentally the story of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, told with compassion and insight and not an ounce of condescension for these characters as they try to figure out their shit. I loved it. I laughed, I cried. I recommended it to everyone. I bought it for someone. I started a Best of 2019 post just so I could put this book on it.
In case you are not convinced yet, let me add that I skimmed through looking for a couple of images that would illustrate what I loved so much about the art and writing, and whilst doing that I read the end, and it made me cry again. Even without the rest of the book! What a great fucking book. Do yourself a favor and read it straight away, and you can thank me later.