 Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting episode, another edition of A We Can Geek Them here on YouTube. Gio here and today we're talking this one summer from Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. Let's do this. Welcome back to the channel everybody and yeah I finally got around to making a video about this one summer. I've had this book since 2018. I read it when I got it back then and sort of forgot about it and I was looking at it the other day and decided you know what, I need to give it another read because it's summer and I could use a quaint slice of life to you know sort of just enjoy the lazy days of July if you will. So what exactly is this one summer? Well it is a vignette of course and it is this coming-of-age story of two teenage friends Rose and Wendy during a summer in the small beach town of Awago and I hope I said that right and she is going to this cottage that her family rents every summer and she meets up with her friend Wendy. Now once they get there we start learning more about the characters through the interactions between the two girls. They see each other once every year during summer so in the catching up and all that stuff we get their conversations about life, about their family, friends, relationships, them growing up, sexuality, things that people reading this book can relate to and that's easily one of the strongest points of this first second book is that the conversations that these characters are having is pretty realistic and is pretty endearing because although I don't necessarily went through things talked about in this book for example but still you can place yourself in a similar situation you can envision yourself as a kid growing up with friends and the stories and the adventures and the just the friendship that would be formed and of course spending time in summer not having a care in the world basically and growing up and discovering about adult issues about life stuff like that so the two characters are sort of exploring the town and becoming acquainted with each other after so long and different plot threads start to form at the start of the book we soon realized that roses family or parents aren't necessarily kidding along and throughout the book you're starting to ask yourself what exactly is going on they start dropping you hints here and there I'm not necessarily going to spoil what is happening with them in this book but it is a very real raw powerful issue and problem that they're having and it it's presented through the eyes of our narrator which is Rose and her inexperience in trying to figure out why her parents are behaving this way why the conflict and she's frustrated because she doesn't she can't do anything about it but she wants things to be normal or have a sense of normalcy I guess meanwhile we have the character of windy who is a lot more carefree and funny and comedic but you also discover that there is a maturity to her when it comes to certain topics as the two of them start exploring the town they meet up at this convenience store if you will and another dramatic element of the story forms with the teenagers or the young adults working in that store with their relationship issues and how they view things obviously they're going to be more brazen and more outgoing and fluid with the language and what they're saying and doing and it can come off sort of gross to younger crowds but it definitely shapes and evolves our main characters into them realizing people are layered and people are different and they go through different things that help shape and grow into adults and I think it's a life lesson not only for them but for maybe younger audiences reading the book for them to realize how different we all are and trying to find in the midst of growing up and being a kid and a young adult trying to find your own voice and trying to find out who you are through those experiences for good or bad they will definitely define you later on as an adult so even though the like I mentioned earlier the plot isn't necessarily something that a hundred percent of the people out there will relate to you can still find parallels of what is happening to your own life or to people you know or grew up with with stories about friends and family members the art in the book is easily one of my favorite things about it the way Gillian is able to take sort of blue pen artwork and mix it kind of like black and white but with purple hues it just really brings a level of realism to the story where I think if it were just black and white it would lose some of the magic to it yes sometimes black and white stories can drive the the story along to a very dramatic tense point but by having subtle influxes of color you're able to create sort of this sense of warmth and nostalgia where it evokes more feeling for the readers and I really appreciated that it really encapsulated a small beach town I think and would and what you perceive as a beach town with you can just imagine being there and smelling the the the ocean and the sea breeze hitting you and all the sights and sounds of something like that and you know the vegetation and the stores and how rural it it all looks and I think it they did a fantastic job with this book I absolutely loved it I really do praise the art and how beautiful it looks for being minimal in tone the characters are expressive and even though sometimes they might look a little bit cartoonish they still retain their humanity and you feel what they're feeling that they're very expressive making this book feel like it was part of something that you went through or grew up with and that's very hard to do especially with the limited color palette and the nature of the story being a slice of life can sort of limit you with what you can do you sort of rely on the characters not necessarily the narrative structure because this one summer this literally means this small window where the characters come in and experience something dramatic and grow from there so when they leave they either come out a different person or through the process of change so you in that regards yes you have a lot of freedom because you're telling stories about real people but it can be a little bit hard to do because of the open nature of it there really isn't an ending per se to the story it leaves off pretty open-ended we do realize some pretty major things and you have characters that are likable and realistic and they go through a necessary change into the fall season and we just hope the best from there we can only hope that people continue to evolve and grow better and always remember what they went through in that one summer if that makes any sense but yeah overall just a beautiful slice of life slash coming of age story about maturity again i have to praise the art and the dialogue mariko tamaki did a fantastic job of writing these characters and the way that the girls are talking and even the teenagers and the adults it's very raw candid and real i could i definitely could see uh kids of that age speaking the way that they're doing in that book it is a very natural thing i i think i read somewhere that there was a little bit of controversy with the book back when it released i think it was 2014 or something like that but that's silly i think it does capture the essence of the summer season and growing up and the problems that we go through in life and it is a worthy experience to have and i do wholeheartedly recommend it i typically don't review a lot of books like this on the channel but if you guys want me to go after something similar let me know in the comment section down below because i love the slice of life and coming of age genre i love doing that and watching shows that are about that stuff so if you have any more recommendations or if you want me to cover a specific book let me know in the comment section down below have you read this one summer let me know as well what you thought of the book guys thank you so very much again thank you for liking commenting subscribing and being a part of a weekend gigtam it really does mean a whole lot there's a merch link down below if you want to check it out follow me on social media facebook twitter instagram all that fun stuff thank you so very much once again i will catch all of you on our next episode