Skim

Tamaki, M., & Tamaki, J. (2009). Skim. London: Walker Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-4063-2136-4 (Originally published in Canada in 2008.)

Why read this book

These fragments from Skim’s diary leave a lot of room for speculation and imagination. Why did John, a volleyball player in another school, commit suicide? Why is Katie, his ex-girlfriend, so angry with the girls who try to help her? Why is Lisa, Skim’s best friend, so cynical until all the sudden she gets a boyfriend? And what does Skim feel for Ms. Archer, the English teacher who suddenly disappears?

Plot summary

Skim is a 16-year-old 10th grader at a private girls’ school in Canada. Her mother is Japanese Canadian and her father is European Canadian, but they’re divorced. Skim only has one friend in school, Lisa, and they are into Wicca and being Goths. Life doesn’t get any easier for them when a classmate’s ex-boyfriend commits suicide, the classmate breaks both her arms falling off a roof, and all the girls in school go on suicide watch a bit too enthusiastically. Skim’s got her own private dramas since she and Ms. Archer, her English teacher, got to know each other outside of school. Kim secretly visits Ms. Archer at her home until Ms. Archer suddenly quits her job and disappears without saying good-bye.

Critical evaluation

Skim manages to raise issues of Wicca, smoking, teen suicide, and inappropriate same-sex relationships between teachers and students in one short graphic novel. Skim creates a mosaic of intense, scattered feelings, including confusion, anger, and cynicism, that add up to loneliness above all else. It’s an interesting effort to evoke adolescence as an emotional state of being rather than a traditional textual narrative. Skim suggests a fourth type of young adult plot – the plot of mood – to add to Roxburgh’s plots of character, action, and ideas (2005). Creating mood is an especially appropriate use of the graphic novel format, where the visual images can contribute a great deal to the effort. Key points of the story’s plot, such as a kiss between Skim and Ms. Archer (p. 40-41), are conveyed visually but not in the text, leaving the reader wondering if they actually happened. The writer’s deft use of Skim as an unreliable narrator adds to the ambiguity of the mood the story creates. Skim tells us what’s going on in her life – such as her visits to Ms. Archer’s house – but we have to make our own assumptions, based mostly on the drawings, about what happens there and how Skim feels about it. Even Skim’s dialogue often conveys mood more than action, as when she says, “My stomach feels like it’s popping, like an ice cube in a warm Pepsi” (p. 33), or “I had a dream / I put my hands / inside by chest / and held my heart / to try to keep it still” (p. 43). The unconventional narrative form and the ambiguity of the mood that Skim creates is likely to engage both die-hard readers looking for something different and reluctant readers who look to the graphics for meaning.

About the creators

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki are cousins. Mariko, who wrote the text for Skim, is a writer and stage performer who lives in Toronto. Her other works of fiction include a novella, Cover Me (2000), a collection of short stories, Fake ID (2005), and another young adult graphic novel, Emiko Superstar (2008). She has also published a collection of essays, True Lies: The Book of Bad Advice (2002). She maintains a web site at www.marikotamaki.com.

Jillian Tamaki, who created the drawings for Skim, is a Canadian who lives in New York City and works as an illustrator. She maintains a web site at jilliantamaki.com.

Genre: Asian American, Graphic fiction, LGBTQ

Curriculum ties

It would be fun to use Skim in an art class to teach students how drawings convey emotion and create mood. In a creative writing class, Skim could be a good model for using text to convey ambiguity rather than precision in one’s writing.

Book-talking ideas

• Every ten pages or so there are full-page illustrations that are especially engaging. Any two or three of them could be projected to provoke discussion about what information they convey and to preview some of the moods the book evokes.

• Show the YouTube video in which the creators talk about themselves and Slim. (There’s a YouTube summary of Slim, too, but it’s narrated poorly.)

Reading level/interest age

The visual presentation and the simplicity of the text make the narrative accessible to younger teens, but they might not be as patient as older teens with the importance of mood in the experience of reading Skim.

Challenge issues

As noted before, Skim manages to raise issues of Wicca, smoking, teen suicide, and inappropriate same-sex relationships between teachers and students in one short graphic novel. The ambiguity of what Skim is trying to say about these topics will probably only add to the discomfort that some adults might feel about the book.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Be sure that the challenger understands that, above all, Skim is about loneliness, an important issue for many teens, and that teens suffering from loneliness need to have access to stories that help them understand their feelings.

Why I chose to read this book

I saw Skim on a list of graphic novels or a list of LGBTQ novels early in the semester and bought a copy. I started it once and didn’t find it very engaging, but when I returned to it after reading other graphic fiction and non-fiction I found it more interesting than the first time around.

References

Roxburgh, S. (2005, Winter). The art of the young adult novel. The ALAN Review, 4-10. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v32n2/