What Is Left by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell

You can follow her on both twitter and tumblr. She spends most of her free time running Dungeons & Dragons (like she has since the 90’s), and has even published a few adventures for it. Samantha Lavender is a lesbian library assistant on the west coast, making ends meet with a creative writing degree and her wonderful butch partner. The art is great, the humor lands well, and I finished the book wanting more but feeling satisfied with what I had. The story is tight and well-paced, but there’s enough complexity going on that I don’t feel like a second read-through would be merely perfunctory.

The romance is adorable and sweet, but the characters have their own nuances that keeps it from feeling flat or predictable. Everything I saw the other graphic novels in this list reach for, The Girl From the Sea pulls off. It’s about a closeted teenage lesbian living in a small island town, whose teetering life balance is completely upended with she falls in love with a selkie.

The Girl From the Seaby Molly Knox Ostertag takes the cake, hands down, as my favorite graphic novel of the bunch. But considering how poorly masculine women are still treated today, it honestly hurt a little to read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me and see such an obvious elevation of queer femininity at their expense. This isn’t to say that the story is invalid because I didn’t like how a character was coded butches can, of course, be bad partners. The characterization of Laura Dean clearly evokes the imagery of butch lesbians it’s what makes her so “cool,” so desirable, but it’s also inextricably tied to what makes her a bad girlfriend. That said, this book is never going to be a favorite of mine-and not just because it isn’t a happy romance. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me feels layered in a way that the other graphic novels here so far haven’t, and I really liked how the authors would just let certain moments or transitions breathe. Freddy Riley loves Laura Dean, but Laura Dean neglects, isolates, takes for granted, and yes, keeps breaking up with Freddy. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Meby Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is a wonderfully drawn and well-written graphic novel about a bad relationship.

What Is Left by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell