Characters’ faces are wonderfully expressive, and the girls’ bodies are real: all shapes and sizes and colours. Sometimes they span an entire page, or even two sometimes the background is a black night sky sprinkled with stars sometimes the page is mostly white, scarcely touched by the scratch of ink with only a few grey outlines of clouds and black birds. Jillian Tamaki’s drawings are exquisite, beautiful shades of white and gray and black. Our narrator is Kim, aka Skim, which, she explains, is a nickname she got “because she’s not.” She’s a high school student at a girls’ school in Toronto she’s not cool, she’s not skinny, she’s sad, she’s an aspiring Wiccan, and she just might be falling in love with her quirky, hippie English teacher, Ms.
It’s never preachy, for one thing, and it presents a wonderfully nuanced and complex view of these issues. I first read this book about five years ago, and remember really liking it re-reading it, I think I appreciate even more what a subtly moving and poetic work of art-visual and linguistic-it is.įor a book that takes on subject matter such as teen suicide, the effects of racism and sexism on girls’ body images, depression, the complexities of discovering queerness amidst a homophobic environment, and that cruelty particular to teenage girls, Skim is surprisingly fun to read. And although it takes the classic form of a teenage girl’s diary, this graphic novel is anything but what you might expect from that format. Skim has a wonderful balance of teenage angst, earnestness, and heightened emotion. It’s dark, and beautiful, and heartbreaking, and sad, and perceptive.
In the spirit of the Wiccan main character, I declare Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim to be utterly magickal.
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