I’ve read two MG graphic novels this month about 12yo girls navigating big changes, puberty, and school and honestly, it’s been charming af.

This one I read because my niece bought it at the book fair and I said I would borrow it from the library and read it so we could talk about it. When I asked her what we should talk about, she said we should say what our favourite scenes were. So my favourite scenes were the halloween sleepover and the birthday party, but also the christmas with the family at the end. I also liked the fictional comic Spell that the main character likes. It reminds me of Sailor Moon.

I also really liked that this is set in Montreal! Not a lot of English-language things are set in the province I come from and has my first language in it so that was very cool (even though I am not literally from Montreal itself).

This comic touched on typical 12yo things like first periods and first crushes and friendship drama, but has a little different element where the MC and her family have just immigrated to Canada from Romania and she has to deal with being in a new school, new culture, and learning a new language. She really struggles at first and you get invested in her life and wanting her to make friends and figure out who she can be in this new place. Really liked that the author used different colours for the speech bubbles to indicate which language is being spoken while most of the text is in English. It’s nice to see the yellow bubbles for French being full of scribbles because the MC doesn’t understand the language, progressively have more words in them as she becomes better at communicating. Honestly a really nice read as well, even though I am obviously not the target audience now. I was once 12! It sucked! But it was also great in many ways. I don’t remember having a lot of stories like these back then (though certainly some) so I’m happy to seem them exist in the world for children to read.