Unlike most of the creators of the graphic novels I've been reviewing at the Nameless Zine, Debbie Drechsler seems to be a fine artist who was drawn into comics for a brief period. Her primary output is a pair of graphic novels: 'Daddy's Girl', a semi-autobiographical story that covered taboo subjects such as rape and incest; and 'The Summer of Love', also semi-autobiographical but far more subtle in its impact. I haven't read the former but the latter was fascinating to me, having never been a teenage girl.

It's entirely told through the character of Lily, the middle of three girls in a family that moves from Cleveland, Ohio to another town in another state, arriving on the first page. They get there during the summer break, so it's quiet and uneventful until school starts, at which point it's louder but still uneventful. At least, that's how it initially felt to me because so much of the book is taken up with the sheer banality of everyday life. Children meet other children, say hello and say goodbye with nothing in between, hang out in someone's back garden for no apparent reason except that it's a place where they can hang out. For a long while, it feels like there's nothing here.

However, the point of the book, which is masterfully handled by Drechsler as both writer and artist, is that all these nothing moments can have serious meaning to a teenage girl and adding them up over a year can be devastating. I felt some of this personally, because I remember being the new kid. My family moved from the south of England to the north after my first year in grammar school so everyone else got a year to determine where they all fit together before I showed up and had to figure out how to find my place in that. It wasn't fun but I was twelve. It was probably easier for me than it was for Lily starting in ninth grade at maybe fifteen.

And that's probably why I didn't feel a lot of this personally, as much sympathy as I had for Lily going through it. There's a great scene early in the book where she explores the woods behind her new house, initially free but then scared and then free again. She stumbles on a clearing and dances spontaneously in the moment, a moment shattered when she lies down and sees a tree house above with a boy looking down at her. Naturally she's mortified and runs away, but that boy liked what he saw and seeks her out, so starting a neat friendship. Suddenly it's the Lily and Steve show and he seems cool so we're happy.

But, after a while and a little working through the bases, she reacts in a certain way and a misunderstanding hurls a wedge between them. Suddenly our happy story is a sad one and it only gets sadder as it goes, as Lily appears to have quite the knack of not saying what she needs to at certain points, just through the likelihood that she's going to be embarrassed, and not saying what she needs hurls further wedges between friends. It's at the point we start to wonder if Lily is the architect of her own misery that we realise that everyone else in the story is probably going through exactly the same thing. High school is a long series of misunderstandings that take people in completely different directions to where they should probably go.

Certain discoveries don't help either. There are other characters in this story, as much as it's focused crucially on Lily, and we start to learn a little about a few of them. Her elder sister Pearl is the closest one, not merely because they share a room and because they drive each other nuts in a way only sisters can do but also due to Lily stumbling accidentally onto a secret that Pearl has been keeping, one that comes back to flavour the end of the book. The most telling is Dunham, a boy who clearly likes Lily as much as Lily likes Steve, but has a poor way of showing it. He's good at emotional blackmail and he's good at starting false rumours.

I didn't like Dunham from the beginning but I didn't really have feelings, positive or negative, for almost any other character. Many have resonance to Lily but none of them do to us, because they're interchangable teen kids. I might have connected more with Lily's much younger sister Kay, who helps ants migrate from one home to another, than any of her peers, except Steve, who plays in a band and comes over to listen through the new Jefferson Airplane album with her. And all that feels weird, because I'm used to liking and disliking characters for this reason and that, but, again, that's not what this is about.

This is about collating all the little and nothing moments in a year, few of which seem individually worthy of a second glance, and realising that, put together, they amount to a heck of a lot. That year is an impactful one indeed for Lily, one that she's not going to forget in a hurry and one which will surely carry ramifications into the summer and the next school year beyond. This was utterly fascinating for me, especially because I have a firm tendency of not even noticing moments because of my particular neurodivergence. Nowadays, my better half notices them on my behalf and lets me know, but I didn't have her to do that for me when I was in school. I can't help but wonder about how much I missed and how much I wish I hadn't.

The other major thing deserving of mention here is the colour scheme. Drechsler's art is reminiscent of what underground comics I've encountered, with the human figure subtly distorted but so consistently that we fail to even notice it after a while. It's engaging art, especially in the eyes, which are larger than they realistically should be but smaller than anime would make them; much of the emotion is delivered through Lily's eyes. It's the colour scheme that's unusual, because everything unfolds in a strange combination of green and red, as if we're supposed to be wearing 3D glasses to truly discern it. It felt like an odd choice to me until I realised that it's almost the colour of a bruise. There's no rape or incest here but it's a bruising year for Lily nonetheless. ~~ Hal C F Astell