A + E 4ever
by I. Merey
Eh, 2.5 stars? It was hard to get into at the beginning---the text was hard to read (especially the chapter titles! jeez!) and the panels and dialogue often failed to flow, leaving me lost and confused in the middle of the page. I'm not sure if it got better towards the middle or if I just got used to having to look at each page a little longer to understand what was going on. The characters are hard to tell apart, despite their distinctive hair, and most are skeletally thin... just the style?
When I was in high school I was superficially a lot like the characters---did art, didn't think of myself as queer at the time but had crushes on one or two gay guy friends, was/am a 6'2" girl, one of a few Jews---but I found myself shaking my head at the connections more than nodding. My squareness is probably the biggest source of disconnect; I didn't ever aspire to wear safety pins in my nose, and it wasn't for lack of role models.
While I didn't like the package it was wrapped in, the story itself is... fine. You know, a romance... but I wasn't into the characters enough to find it compelling. A little outside the ordinary... but not far enough outside the ordinary to justify how excited LGBTQ+ booklists are getting over it. Everyone has ISSUES with a capital I, and most of them are dropped rather than resolved. There were weird, extremely vague suggestions of child abuse, incest, sexism, disordered eating, mental illness, drug abuse, etc., but they were more "color" than character development. The first ending is fairly solid; the unnecessary epilogue muddles everything again.
If you weren't (or didn't aspire to be) a bullied goth/punk/whatever with artsy pretensions who went to a lot of crazy parties where you did regrettable things, or if you don't get excited about the art style by flipping through it, I don't recommend pursuing this one.