Title: I Am Not Okay With This
Author: Charles Forsman
Illustrator: Charles Forsman
Date Read: 5/14/2020
Pages: 160
Publication Date: December 5th, 2017
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Format: e-book, through hoopla
Rating: 1 star – ⭐️
Synopsis (taken from GoodReads): Sydney seems like a normal 15-year-old freshman. She hangs out underneath the bleachers, listens to music in her friend’s car, and gets into arguments with her annoying little brother — but she also has a few secrets she’s only shared in her diary. Like how she’s in love with her best friend Dina, the bizarreness of her father’s death, and those painful telekinetic powers that keep popping up at the most inopportune times. In this collection of the self-published minicomic series, Forsman expertly channels the teenage ethos in a style that evokes classic comic strips while telling a powerful story about the intense, and sometimes violent, tug of war between trauma and control.
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What I Disliked About this Book:
Writing: Half of what makes a graphic novel great is the writing. Sadly, this one fell short for me. The writing was very basic. It was clear that it was a 30 something year old man trying to write from the perspective of a teen girl and it did not work at all.
Art Style: While I understand that Forsman’s style is simple, this kind of simple did not work for me. The art is the other half that makes a graphic novel work, and sadly, neither of these two important aspects worked for me.
Story Line: While the concept, in essence, was decent, the execution just did not work. It was all over the place, none of the points were fleshed out, it was a nightmare to read at times. I was tempted to DNF.
Content: The amount of triggering content in such a short graphic novel absolutely boggles my mind. In less than 200 pages, this graphic novel covers sexual assault, murder, self harm, an underage relationship, and suicidal ideation/glorification. None of these are made right at the end of the novel, in fact, arguably, some of these are made out in an even worse light than originally perceived.
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Overall, I am not okay with this book at all. (Ha, see what I did there. I like to think I’m funny.) The fact that this is the source material for a new Netflix show is beyond me. I wanted to read this in order to be prepared to watch the show, but the book just completely turned me off from wanting to watch it. I’ve heard that the show does a good job of cleaning the issues up, but I just have no urge to watch it anymore, after reading this mess of a graphic novel. There are so many problematic points in this graphic novel, I sort of wish I had just DNF’ed it. I hope that if you read this, you had a much better experience than me. This was just not the book for me.
Book Reviews From a Novel Nerd 