Irresistible, funny and touching-a must read for all teenage girls, whether en-braced or not. As an afterword, the author includes a photo of her smiling, showing off the results of all of the years of pain she endured. Readers should not overlook this seemingly simply drawn work the strong writing and emotionally expressive characters add an unexpected layer of depth. Young girls will relate to her story, and her friend-angst is palpable. After years of these girls’ constant belittling, Raina branches out and finds her own voice and a new group of friends.
Her friends offer little solace through this trying ordeal, spending more of their time teasing than comforting her. This leads to years of painful surgeries, braces, agonizing root canals and other oral atrocities. One night, Raina trips and falls after a Girl Scout meeting, knocking out her two front teeth.
Telgemeier has created an utterly charming graphic memoir of tooth trauma, first crushes and fickle friends, sweetly reminiscent of Judy Blume’s work. Her commitment to combating injustice, however, was unaffected, and she remains an inspiring figure whom contemporary readers will be pleased to discover. Both Colvin and the author speculate that it was Colvin’s unplanned (and unwed) pregnancy that prevented her from being embraced as the face of the Civil Rights movement. Period photographs and reprints of newspaper articles effectively evoke the tenor of the times. The sequence of events unfolds clearly, with its large cast of characters distinctly delineated. Hoose’s frank examination of Colvin’s life includes sizable passages in her own words, allowing readers to learn about the events of the time from a unique and personal perspective. Although she later participated with four other women in the court case that effectively ended segregated bus service, it is Rosa Parks’s action that became the celebrated event of the bus boycott. A teenager in the 1950s, Colvin was the first African-American to refuse to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Ala. Claudette Colvin’s story will be new to most readers.
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