Skim

by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Book Overview

The time is the early 1990s, the setting a girls' academy in Toronto. Enter "Skim," aka Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a not-slim, would-be Wiccan goth. When her classmate Katie Matthews is dumped by her boyfriend, who then kills himself, the entire school goes into mourning overdrive. It's a weird time to fall in love, but Skim does just that after secret meetings with her neo-hippie English teacher, Ms. Archer. When Ms. Archer abruptly leaves the school,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0888997531
• ISBN13: 9780888997531
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.8" x 10.0"
• Age Range: 14 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 and higher

Customer Reviews

Never got my book

I was told the address was incomplete and it was sent back, did not get a book or a refund.

a very fine book

At first glance the artwork is sloppy, but then I realize it is actually deceptively precise, almost like X ray lithography! The story is also very nice. I guess high school girls these days are very intelligent.

beautifully written and drawn coming of age story

I recommend this book to everyone, but especially girls 14 - 18. Kim, the main character, faces social pressures, frustrating friendships and life's uncertainties with dignity and strength.

a beautiful , honest and stirring story of youth and transition

this book is so good at what it sets out to say and show that i hesitate to describe it for fear of underselling it's attributes . the editorial reviews found above as well as some of the excellent customer reviews here might prompt you to aquire this outstanding "graphic novel" . that's the goal . for mature teens and adults .

gorgeous, sophisticated, and deeply truthful

SKIM is gorgeous. Canadian cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki are to be praised for such smart, sensitive, sophisticated treatment of unyielding material. Coaxing a suspenseful, surprising, hopeful narrative out of the anti-narrative horror of high school is no easy feat, but coaxing one out that remains true to the recursive slowness of the experience, the smothering isolation of it-- AND leaves you cheering for the heroine in the end-- is all the more impressive. The Tamakis explore the complex experience of their heroine, Kim Keiko Cameron, by tapping the full potential of graphic novels to offer the reader multiple channels through which to take in information. The verbal line of the novel, with two magnificent exceptions, is the reader's primary guide through the lesbian strand of Kim's experience, while the visual line, with one heartbreaking flashback, is the primary medium through which Kim's Japanese-Canadian heritage is given witness: her mother breaking noodles, her father's thing for Asian women. Most arresting, visually, is Jillian Tamaki's choice to give Kim the face of a traditional Japanese beauty. Short eyebrow-smudges high on the forehead and long loose hair, along with a small mouth, very rounded cheeks, and a low-placed nose are all markers used to indicate Heian-era female beauty from Tosa's TALE OF GENJI illustrations to Noh Ko-omote masks to traditional Otafuku and Benten imagery. What's canny, and oh-so-true to the tenth grade experience, is that Tamaki takes this marked-as-beautiful face and places it in a context-- an almost entirely white Canadian girls' private high school-- that completely invalidates its beauty. Among the many riches SKIM has to offer is the chance to witness Kim's coming-of-age as a critic, which is inextricably bound up with her coming into her own as a lesbian. When Kim discovers for herself (and a lame date) precisely what strikes her as inadequate about ROMEO AND JULIET, in a way that both emerges organically from and radically illuminates the whole story we've been reading, it's a moment of breathtaking mastery on Mariko Tamaki's part. Brava to Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, and here's looking forward to more from each and both of them.

Fantastic!

A fantastic, fantastic graphic novel. Modern Catcher in the Rye if Holden Caulfield were a Goth lesbian.