“What relationship should we have to the things we love?”
Junkwraith is maybe my second girl’s figure skating graphic novel. Who knew I would even read one in my lifetime, though I do always watch the figure skating in the Winter Olympics (and never at any other time!). Tillie Walden’s Spinning is a memoir of her skating competition days and it felt to me kinda flat, though as with Walden, amazingly drawn.
Junewraith is also about a girl’s--Flo’s--skating competition days, but is told as a kind of fantasy story with allegorical elements about going into the wilderness and risk-taking, in a place where everyone is accompanied by little programmed practical life guides that look like egg cups. Think something like Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials daemons. Or imaginary friends. But in Junkwraith they are called jujus. As in, “get your juju back,” I think. Anyway, if you don’t have a juju, as with The Golden Compass, you are a bad person; you may be an outlaw or pirate (or Johnny Depp) (No memes, sorry).
In this story there’s a Professor named Octavia (as in Octavia Butler, I am quite sure) who provides our hero with a map into the “waste,” where there is this actual environmental waste just as you have psychological “waste” you need to--not get rid of, but--reuse for positive reinvention of yourself:
“We’re only beginning to see what waste can give us.”
There’s a bad guy named Duchamp, as in Marcel, the surrealist.
Junk is what Flo carries in her back pack in the waste-land. . . junk wraiths. . . are like pirates, stealing your self esteem, too? A junk wraith--her junk wraith-steals her skates from the trash where she threw them when she suddenly gives up skating, mocked by all the mean girl skaters, but particularly the highly successful skater Zoe. Get it, Flo, Zoe? Go with the Flo!
Here’s how you know it is an allegorical story; different sections are called things like The Cave of Recovery. There’s an eco-lodge where waste re-use is the theme: wasted time, wasted energy, Reuse your past to make a better present!
It was the wonderful artwork, pizzazzy and colorful and fun and slightly alt-girly, that I came for, but I left puzzled because of the story, and tired by the length of it. I mean, phew, 280 pages for this takeaway: Don’t give up, shore up you resolve!? “Good was never enough for you. Your ambition was always star quality and nothing else.” Editor alert!
But you know, she says in her appendix that her manga teacher told her to double the page count to give the story room to breathe. So she blames it on the manga teacher?!
It’s an adapted web-comic about mental health-- anxiety, and the destructive capacity of perfectionism.
It just might be that it’s like The Wizard of Oz--there’s no place like home--the adventure takes place in her head, in her bedroom!
It's obviously a little heavy-handed in the message department, so back off there a bit, I'd say, Elllinor, and work on complexity of character and plot next time, but a very promising artist drew and colored this.