Book Review Thoughts: Smile by Raina Telgemeier

Book: Smile by Raina Telgemeier
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

In an effort to read more widely, the book club has been adding graphic books to our lineup recently. This particular book is our February choice. It's one I've seen floating around for years, I remember it way back from my book fair days, which was a long time ago! It's fun to finally read it!

Basically, the author who is an amazing artist, has illustrated and documented her middle school years, which are defined by the fact that she has to get major orthodontic work because of an incident where she fell and knocked out her front teeth. It does sound quite traumatic and had I been her, I wouldn't have suffered through it quite as well as she did I'm afraid.

And her friends! Sheesh, what terrible friends! I was happy to see that even as a kid, she realized this pretty quickly and made changes. I think most kids would have just been devasted and wallowed in self pity.

It was fun to see the historical and cultural references she made to stuff going on in the world. This was during my "lost years" where I wasn't paying attention to much of anything since I had just entered my life as a mommy with little babies. So while I can't say totally that I related, I did enjoy experiencing it with her.

Bottom Line: I found it to be very fun and a fabulous way to preserve a bit of one's life story!

P.S. I was so happy to see they included a real life picture of the author as she looks today... smiling! So we could see how her smile turned out all these years later!

Other Reviews:

Something I love the most about this book - well, maybe it's just Raina Telgemeier - is the power of storytelling through comics, even stories from your own life. From The Blue Bookcase

What I really love about this book is how well Telgemeier captures tween angst. The accurately portrays many of the struggles tween girls are faced with, from fake friends to body image issues. From The Reading Zone

I really liked the artwork; it’s pretty straightforward panel-based narrative, but I like Telgemeier’s style of drawing, and the book is really bright and colorful throughout. From Fyrefly's Book Blog

I really enjoyed the nostalgia I felt while reading. From Jenni Elyse