I wish I could say that I liked Good as Lily, the final book in the first wave of books from DC’s Minx imprint. But I can’t, and I don’t think I can even say it’s very good.
It’s written by Derek Kirk Kim, creator of the marvelous, deservedly award-winning Same Difference and Other Stories (Top Shelf). Maybe my appreciation for that book left my expectations unfairly high, but Good as Lily is clunky in just about every respect.
It’s about an 18-year-old girl named Grace whose birthday is slightly marred by a conk on the head from a piñata. After she comes around, she finds herself surrounded by variously aged versions of herself at six, 29, and 70. How will she manage this wacky development and keep the school play alive?
(Spoilers after the cut.)
The answer is, “Blandly,” for the most part. One of the major problems is that Grace, though pleasant enough, doesn’t inspire you to wonder what she’ll be like years down the road, or to be curious about what she was like in the past. The other Graces are more types than characters, and it’s hard to determine precisely what 18-year-old Grace is supposed to be taking away from this strange encounter. She’s not at any particular crisis point, either anxious about the future or dwelling on the past.
The let’s-put-on-a-show plot is rendered largely irrelevant by its predictability. When budget woes force the school district to cancel the school play, 29-year-old Grace convinces the troupe to fund it themselves. (As an aside, I don’t think plucky kids funding their own arts activities teaches school administrators anything other than that the arts will take care of themselves, and that individual passion will absolve them of the responsibility of providing varied activities.) Screwball mishaps ensue, mostly to give illustrator Jesse Hamm something lively to draw.
And there’s a Mean Girl wedged into the narrative, mostly for the sake of having a Mean Girl on hand to get her comeuppance. If Minx wanted to be really daring, they’d write a book about a pretty, popular girl laboring under the tyranny of nerds.
I’m left with the impression that Kim is writing down to his audience, which is unfortunate and unnecessary. There’s a distressing amount of expository dialogue to prop up slim characterization. People tell each other how wonderful and interesting they are, though there’s little in terms of action that lets them demonstrate those qualities.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a couple of great-ish scenes in it. There’s a graveside memorial that hints at a much more interesting graphic novel (and explains the title). Another scene deftly portrays unintentional parental cruelty. Both of these sequences have real teeth; they’re challenging and layered. They’re also relatively incidental to the book as a whole, and they make the rest of it look worse.
If you really want to give a teen a great graphic novel, track down a copy of Same Difference. It may not be written specifically for them, but I think they’ll find it a lot more satisfying.