Justine

January 4, 2021
Harmon’s debut illustrated novel (after the illustrated biography The Art of the Affair) is a spare but vivid exploration of a lonely teenager’s complicated life. Ali’s life is small: she lives with her soap opera–watching Swedish grandmother and her cat, Marlena, in a small house on Long Island in the mid-1990s. She develops a crush on Justine, the checkout girl at the local Stop and Shop, and begins following her lead by obsessing about weight and surviving on only fat-free yogurt and Diet Coke, throwing up when she’s consumed too much, reading Vogue, tearing out pages of models and hanging them on her bedroom walls, shoplifting, and becoming part of Justine’s small circle of friends. Ali also explores her sexuality through her attraction to Justine as well as Ryan, a boy who works at a gas station. As Ali’s relationship with Justine develops, the group gets into greater danger. The author’s clean, thin-lined illustrations add period detail to the prose’s cool lyricism, and though there are some mesmerizing passages, the reader glenas limited insight into Ali’s interior life. Harmon traces the nuances of a teenage female friendship’s fraught dynamics with clinical precision. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

February 1, 2021

Gr 9 Up-Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat meets Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls in this short illustrated novel set in the 1990s. When Ali first meets pale, skinny Justine at a grocery store, she is instantly infatuated. Unsure if she wants to be with her or to be her, Ali takes a cashier job at the same store just to be near Justine. The two girls quickly form an intense friendship based on a shared love of supermodel trivia and weight loss tips. Ali-renamed Alison-molds herself in Justine's image, ingratiating herself with her friends, losing weight, and joining her on increasingly risky shoplifting adventures. The only parental figure Ali has is her Swedish grandmother, too preoccupied with Days of Our Lives to notice her granddaughter's downward spiral. Ali comes to enjoy the vestigial power of living in Justine's orbit, but struggles to understand the true nature of their relationship. This slight novel, punctuated with black-and-white line drawings, glides along in a stream-of-consciousness style with numerous tangents as the girls and their friends relate often through one-upmanship in their pop culture trivia knowledge. Harmon's combination of first-person narrative and illustrations makes this work feel akin to a real teenager's diary or sketchbook. There are scenes of sex, drug use, bulimia, and self-harm. VERDICT This novel is likely to appeal to older teens as well as adults, to whom the many details of a late 1990s adolescence may appeal.-Ann Foster, Saskatoon P.L., Sask.

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
It's the summer of 1999: Kate Moss and Katie Holmes grace magazine covers as Ali, a Long Island teenager, encounters Justine, a checkout girl at the local Stop & Shop who's almost as tall and thin as a cover girl herself. Drawn to Justine's real-life glamour, Ali gets a job at the supermarket, and she and Justine become fast friends, or so she thinks. Justine goes from showing Ali the ropes at the store to roping her into risky adolescent behavior, from shoplifting and trespassing to restricting calories and purging. Ali is thrilled to oblige. When they're not working, she and Justine share intimate moments of female friendship--putting on makeup, sunbathing, and getting drunk. Justine, her boyfriend, Chris, and his friend Ryan live in a posher neighborhood and attend a fancier high school than Ali, but she's welcomed into their clique for as long as she's willing to worship Justine's ways. This is Harmon's debut novel, and she also provides illustrations; she's done an impeccable job re-creating a very particular moment in time, exploring what it felt like to be a teenage girl when the beauty ideal for women grew to maddening heights. Though there was no social media, the expectations for how women should look were no less ubiquitous than they are now. Harmon's words and illustrations together show how pervasive and seductive these images were, especially for still-developing minds. While the novel is short on resolution, it's a propulsive depiction of what a summer in the New York suburbs felt like before iPhones and what a crush can drive someone to do. "Justine took my hand and threaded our fingers together," Ali says. "I smiled sideways, feeling a weird, tense pleasure, my attention stretched taut between Ryan and Justine like a jump rope being pulled from either side." Being a teenager is rife with tension, and Harmon confronts the subtle and not-so-subtle violence of coming-of-age. A novel that captures the emotional intensity, confusion, and quickness of adolescence.

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