Mariko Tamaki's This One Summer

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This One Summer is a young adult graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by her cousin Jillian Tamaki. It is a coming-of-age story about an observer named Rose who discovers family difficulties, friendship and local adult drama while on a family summer vacation at Lake Awago. Rose and her summer friend Windy, who is a year and a half younger, are exposed to sexual language by local teenage boys, such as slut, blow jobs and becomes intrigued by the teenager’s drama. Rose quickly develops a crush on Duncan, a teenager who works at Brewster’s, the lake town’s sole business. Another aspect of Rose’s summer was being stunned to see her parents not only actively argue, but that her father leaves home. Furthermore, Rose argues with …show more content…

The parents are revealing an issue between them as they are cleaning up the pieces off the floor. The layout of these two pages is irregular and concrete: there are a combination of homomorphism and hetermorphism panels. Despite the different panel sizes, the panels still follow a linear path from top to bottom. When looking at Groensteen’s main concepts of comics, these two pages are referred to as double pages. In the first page, the last panel is an image of the glass pieces on the floor and on the second page, the first panel is the mother picking up those pieces of the floor. This is seen as a transition from one page to another. All the panels on the first page are about the bowl shattering, while, the panels on the second page are about the parent’s relationship in the aftermath of the broken bowl. These two pages are side by side to demonstrate the correlation between them. Furthermore, the panels on both pages fall under Restricted Arthology, meaning, there is sequential relations between panels. These two consecutive pages employ a range of devices and techniques that communicate the beginning of the parent’s downfall in relation to the broken

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