This One Summer: On the Precipice of Comfort and Change

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer is a graphic novel that truly encapsulates the troubled, complicated world of adolescence; its protagonist, Rose, is a girl around thirteen who spends her summers at her family’s cottage near Awago Beach, swimming, drinking “pop” (native New Yorker here, so calling it anything other than soda feels alien to me), and watching horror movies with her younger friend, Windy. Since its publication in 2014, the graphic novel has become a critically beloved member of the YA genre. The Tamaki cousins’ exploration of youth is compelling. The terrifying realities of adulthood are observed through the eyes of a young, often passive, protagonist whose pettiness, bitterness, envy, confusion, and self-involvement act as a filter to the trauma and pain of the women around her. Specifically, her mother’s depression stemming from a miscarriage and the drama surrounding a local teenage girl named Jenny’s possible pregnancy.

All the characters in the book feel like real people you would see in a town like this one: From Rose’s goofy father and melancholic mother, to her boisterous friend Windy and her incense-selling vegan mother and the various other rough-around-the-edges locals who inhabit the beach. Nathan Whitlock wrote for Quill and Quire: “The real genius of the illustration is how the characters are depicted. Each figure in the book is distinct and memorable, no one is conventionally or blandly attractive, and only one or two minor characters even approach caricature. These are people you’ve seen, spoken to, stood in line with.” I understood Rose on a visceral level—a window to my past self. She’s awkward and doesn’t know how to deal with her attractions to boys, and she is beginning to navigate the beginnings of womanhood, which, as many of us know, means wading through a swamp of self-loathing and internalized misogyny. I’m twenty-five now, but I can look back on my teenage years and know well enough not to throw stones from a glass houses. I, too, walked that impossible tight rope that many teenagers do, contextualizing my role in a world that I couldn’t understand through self-absorbed confusion. Like Rose, I would consider my emotions first, and had to eventually learn to set them aside to make room for others’. My own feelings of insecurity led me to be resentful of other girls rather than building solidarity. And yet, I also know what it is like to pass over that threshold—to go from wanting to observe older teenagers and be noticed by them—to being like Jenny, and having that innocence ripped away with the baggage that comes from having sex at a younger age. I never got pregnant as a teenager, but I dealt with the judgment, shame, uncertainty, pain, and isolation that early interactions with sexuality can bring along with it (and not to mention, in my own case, being bisexual and ignoring all the signs until college). Teenagers are complicated in that they are a template for the person that is eventually going to be wholly themselves. Yet, this transition from childhood to adulthood is one that harbors its own separate set of problems and crises, whether that stems from hormones and bodies changing or simply navigating the emotions of adults who have forgotten what it is like to be them.

This One Summer is not just a dark rumination on grief, motherhood, sex, and adolescence. Part of its brilliance is this embedded sense of childhood nostalgia. It still feels warm and inviting. The young part of “young adult” shines through. The appeal to the comforts of childhood are implicit in the setting and the importance of familial relationships. Rose’s mother talks to her aunt Jodie about the issues in her marriage and her inability to sleep after losing a baby. As the two are sharing a bottle of wine in the kitchen she says, “I have these crazy thoughts. Like, I wish. I wish I was a little kid. So I could just scream and be mad” (128). While Rose is clumsily circumventing adolescence, we have powerful moments of adult fallibility that illustrate this yearning for a simplicity that never truly goes away with age. We all have times where we wish we could opt out of the overwhelming hardships of adult life. I wish I could scream into a pillow, stop paying my bills, or live off soda and junk food for the rest of my life. But the reality of the situation, for most of us, at least, is that when life becomes upsetting or difficult to deal with, we can’t act like we did when we were children. We have to get up every day and face reality, and sometimes, like Rose’s mother, we face the existential weight of it all from the couch.

To add to this scale, there are sprawling two page spreads of vast ocean or deep, indigo starlit sky. Jillian Tamaki’s art is gorgeous and effortless on the page. She is skilled at depicting nature in a way that makes humans appear small and insignificant, and juxtaposes the scope of the universe with intimate moments that make the characters’ problems and conflicts appear to be important and all-encompassing. In moments where the characters are struggling, the water rises as if they are drowning; the natural world is reactive to their interpersonal conflicts. The beach acts a a set-piece for the nostalgia of Rose’s summer trips, but also, a horrible reminder of her mother’s miscarriage and the reason she refuses to swim in the water. Where the vacation was once a traditional family outing, this time, her father leaves after a fight, and Rose must forge her own path that diverges from what she knows and loves. The setting contains multitudes; it is a place of peace and familiarity, but also a place of turmoil and challenge.

Windy and Rose spend their time together watching horror movies and slashers that they rent for cheap from the local convenience store. Rose has a crush on the older teenager who works there, Dunc, and finds herself upset at his involvement with Jenny. He is the possible father of Jenny’s baby, yet refuses to call her or go with her to the doctor. Even the activities the girls are doing this summer are indicative of their adolescence; watching scary movies is a threshold in its own right for teenagers who want to tackle something more mature and have something to prove in shedding their childhood fears. One of the movies they choose, Wes Craven’s classic Nightmare on Elm Street, is often seen as a metaphor for puberty. The teenagers in the film all have nightmares around the time they begin experimenting with smoking, drinking alcohol, and dating. All but Nancy, the young female heroine of the movie, are murdered by Freddy Krueger. Richard Strange notes in “A Nightmare on Adolescent Street”: “At the end of the film, Nancy finally decides to strip Freddy of all of his power over her. She simply stops believing in him, taking away his energy, and his image disintegrated right before her very eyes. At this point in the narrative, the protagonist completes her transformation from adolescence to adulthood. In the very next scene, Nancy walks out of a door. She goes through the door for the last time as a child, and comes out the other side an adult.” Though less extreme than a horror movie, Rose has her own transformation.

A subtle way that the book creates a similar effect without showing a ton of teenage drinking, smoking, or sex explicitly is the way characters interact with objects. Half-eaten food, empty glasses, collected stones on the beach, and coins left on the counter of the local convenience store are all objects that indicate a kind of human consumption that left a mark on the world around them. Windy and Rose go into the woods and encounter a spot where the older teenagers hang out, finding the remains of their bottles and wrappers, and while Rose is intrigued, Windy runs away from it, desperate to rescind into the familiar and leave behind an adult world yet unexplored. The accumulated waste tells a story, in itself, of what we keep and assign value to, and what we choose to discard. In this way, I find it a clever way to build a world that feels natural and lived-in by true-to-life characters; we see what objects they interact with and their habits forming around their consumption of them. Rose constantly has her face in some kind of magazine. Empty bottles of wine tell a story of sadness or experimentation. Also, these objects tie into the theme of adolescence, as Rose picks which traits and emotions to assign value to in their nostalgia to her, and which to leave behind. The very last page of the book is a panel with Rose’s bedroom, perfectly tidy without any sign of her being there besides a pile of found-objects from the beach, as if when she returns, she will pick up from where she left off. She keeps these objects that remind her of her childhood and the positive aspects of the beach house, but she also does not take them with her when returns home. She walks through her own door.

As an adolescent, the world can be so confusing, and navigating emotions can feel like drowning in the ocean of childhood. What was once familiar, nostalgic, and beloved, now contains a conflict; the beach is a portal to simpler days, but also a reminder of some of the most disturbing aspects of the characters’ lives. Although there have been controversies with this book about its themes and language, leading calls for censorship, I agree with Meryl Jaffe who wrote in her essay, Using Graphic Novels in Education: This One Summer: “this book can be a powerful resource and jumping point for healthy, open, non-threatening discussion about powerfully challenging life issues.” This One Summer is a beautiful, intimate meditation on what it means to be at a transitory time in your life. Framed as being significant, “this one summer” is a precipice of change worth remembering, but also a snapshot into the past with an uncertain future.