1. Lily has her first walk in the woods since last week – she stumbles a fair bit and full-on falls a couple of times but otherwise it goes well. The frozen mud crunches under our feet.
2. It’s been bright all day but when darkness falls so does the snow. The trees hang heavy and the street and moon lights reflect down the garden.
3. We finally turn off the bad film and play a couple of rounds of Ricochet Robots – we laugh as we bounce the rubber bots from wall to wall.
1. The first double-sock day and winter scarf wearing of the season. I forgot how much I like my cosy winter attire.
1b. I accidentally felt my cowl while washing it. It’s only slightly felted but enough to reduce its previously lovely drape. Still, it’s only one ball of wool and a couple of hours work, max: I have an excuse for a new project!
2. The moon looks a brilliant white until a cyclist passes me with LED headlights: next time I look up at it, it looks a dirty yellow. Slowly though, it brightens again and as my eyes adjust, more stars pop out of the blackness until the cloud consumes them.
2b. Ice glittering on the pavement underneath my feet. I slide around in a dance while Lily sniffs the hedgerow.
3. John giggling at an old film. At the end, he declares that it’s put him in a good mood – he wasn’t in a bad mood earlier but he’s in a better one now.
1. Lily’s still poorly – improving but still poorly. Yet her tail wags as fast as ever when I offer her some treats and later, when John comes home.
2. It feels like ages since I’ve listened to some of my favourite music. The warm blanket of melodies on a cold day.
3. The individual flavours shine through in the soup.
1. The day is bright enough to lure me down to the allotment for the first time in three weeks. Everything is, thankfully, undisturbed: the only signs of the wet, warm weather of late are the full water butts, the sogginess underfoot along the paths, and the healthy fat overwintered broad bean seedlings.
1b. The space at the rear of the plot looks particularly barren so I dig a new bed into it: I’ll pick up some new fruit bushes to fill it over the next few weeks.
1c. A pile of pulled dandelions with their full tap roots attached.
2. The doorbell rings: a man offering window cleaning services. I recognise him but I’m not sure where from and then it hits me – he’s the man with the cat from near the bus stop. I mention his kitty and he tells me how he rescued it from knee deep snow, how it’s only got one eye and how it rides around on his shoulder.
3. The crunch of the red peppers in our falafel pittas.
3b. The contrast between the rich saucy and the (pleasantly) bitter aubergine.
I’m planning to read (or re-read) and review a number of graphic novels & comic collections in 2016. The reviews probably won’t be quite as in-depth as some of my others but anyway, this is the first:
It’s rightly acclaimed for its depiction of the contradictions, desires and downright scariness of adolescence, especially as the subsequent move into adulthood: two girls out of step with the rest of the world, clinging to a straining friendship because the future is even more terrifying alone.
Remembering my own teenage/university years, I heavily identified with the girls’ revulsion towards their contemporaries and the vapid world around them – the disgust secretly mixed with envy: how do people like the nauseous Melorra have their lives figured out while they/I’m still utterly lost? (Clue: in real life at least, they’re usually utterly lost too – they’re just better at faking it than I was/am.) On that note, I also appreciated Enid’s reluctance to commit to one aesthetic:
(I’m still envious of people who have that type of certainty of mind. I also enjoyed how Enid is judgmental of others adopting subcultures at a surface level – to distance herself from the fact she’s overtly doing the same.)
The girls, but especially Enid, are pleasantly unlikeable, or rather they are sympathetic characters who do unsympathetic things to continue to distance themselves from the rest of the world. They dick with strangers, are often openly obnoxious to those in closer proximity and even kick out at each other – but at least they, sometimes, have the decency to feel bad about it (sometimes in the moment, and sometimes wrapped up in their wider self-loathing). They become bitter and angry because it’s easier to do that than face up to themselves.
We see the world – as much as we see it at all – through the girls’ viewpoint. We learn nothing of note about the (presumably small) town in which they live, or about the vast majority of their lives up to that point or hopes for the future: we learn how Enid lost her virginity but not why Becky seemingly lives with her grandmother, and we learn that Enid takes an entrance exam for college, but not whether or not she actually wants to go, or what she might study there (possibly because she doesn’t know herself). In addition, there is a timeless quality to the book in general – it could take place at almost any point from, say, the early 1990s up to the present day. This tight view is perfect to illustrate their self-absorption – though you can tell they almost feel bad about this too, or at least are conscious that it’s not great to be so apathetic.
I had a note about not enjoying some of the artwork, especially that of the male characters – they’re less “cartoon” with more detail and shading accentuating fairly repugnant features, compared to the bold smooth lines of Enid & Becky – but considering the story as being told from the girls’ point of view, these depictions make sense — as does the fact the side characters are fairly flat in terms of characterisation: the girls see the men (either their ‘friends’ or strangers) as vile caricatures because they have no interest in seeing them as more fully formed humans. (And, in the case of John Ellis, the character pushes that angle himself: as is noted towards the end of the book, he obsesses about the offensive in order to distinguish himself from everyone else.) That said, it would have been nice to have had some more ‘good’ or at least more fleshed out characters with whom the girls could interact, so that we could see more sides of their personalities. (In Ghost World [DVD]
Overall, that was my main criticism of the book: that there wasn’t enough of it. It felt like it luxuriated in creating their small, bitter world to start with but the last two or three chapters rushed by: even without answering the better-left-unanswered ‘what next?’ question, I think there was room to explore the decline of their friendship and some of the tensions over Josh. (I also thought the Clowes cameo subplot was a bit of an indulgence given the slight nature of the limited chapters/thin final volume.) It feels for a bit of a cop out to set up these difficult characters, then just leave everything hanging at the end.
1. The rhythmic flick of water as I shake my hands dry.
2. Lily happily accepts cuddles then demands a walk, despite being unable to walk more than a few steps without stumbling. We don’t even get as far as the field gate around the corner but she sniffs EVERYTHING.
3. To get on and do something I’d been briefly procrastinating about for no good reason.
© 2025 Louisa Parry
