Skim.

Tami Oliphant is a Ph.D. candidate in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Skim is an astonishingly genuine and original graphic novel. Kimberly Keiko Cameron, aka “Skim,” is a wry and insightful 16-year-old Wiccan goth attending an all-girls’ school in Toronto circa the early 1990s. Skim is not slim, she doesn’t fit in with the popular students at her school, her parents are divorced, and, increasingly, she finds herself at odds with her best friend, Lisa.

Skim tries a number of different strategies to escape her mundane, middle-class existence. For example, in one of the novel’s funniest sequences, we follow Skim and Lisa as they venture to an adult Wiccan/AA meeting in a Scarborough park. But it’s when Katie Mathews’s—one of the school’s most popular students—ex-boyfriend kills himself and when Skim falls for her hippie English teacher, Ms. Archer, that Skim is tossed into adulthood. As the entire school goes into “mourning overdrive”—holding dances and benefits, releasing balloons, and forming the Girls Celebrate Life! club—Skim must deal with her classmates’ “life-affirming” hegemony as she is targeted as someone who is potentially suicidal. At the same time, Skim has to grapple with her feelings for Ms. Archer. Sardonically, Skim muses, “being sixteen is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been.” A surprising plot twist is the friendship that develops between Skim and Katie as they both see through the hypocritical tactics of the life-is-great crowd.

This gorgeous volume is the result of a collaboration between cousins Mariko Tamaki, writer, and Jillian Tamaki, illustrator. The elegiac drawings are sweeping and fine, yet precise. Skim reads like a 16-year-old’s diary—“You can tell when Lisa’s nervous because she acts like I’m an idiot”—and is illustrated like a sketchbook. Highlights include the gorgeous double-page panels, particularly the panel featuring Skim and Ms. Archer in the ravine. From the Japanese woodblock-inspired cover of this graphic novel to the very last panel, there is not one false note. Skim rewards each re-reading and it is heartily recommended.