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jedbird's review
4.0
I've been following Maggie and Hopey since the beginning, and we've gotten old together. The story is simple: everyone gathers at a punk show, Maggie and Hopey get along the way they always have. It's a lovely, comfortable story.
finesilkflower's review
4.0
Read for 2019 Cambridge Public Library Summer Reading Bingo, "A book about music."
The art style is SO COOL. Through simple, clean ink lines and flat black shapes, Hernández communicates so much complexity: vividly expressive, strikingly realistic faces and bodies. The characters look like real people that you might know, recognizable even in 30-years-earlier flashbacks with a variety of different experimental styles (even in a brief period of time when both main characters had the same asymmetrical haircut).
The writing has a similar quality of being spare but deeply grounded and real-feeling. Hernández communicates big emotions in the smallest of moments: looks, body language. A page of the main character entering her reunion, leaving, and then entering again communicate so much ambivalence about her past and current relationships, with her relationship to her past self.
Queer Content: The main characters are queer women who are best friends and exes. This isn't primarily meant to be a queer text so much as it is an aging punk text, about the feelings of revisiting a particular subculture you used to be a part of as an adult who is now more jaded and more conventional; but the characters' association of the punk scene with their budding teen queer identities informs and intensifies those emotions.
The art style is SO COOL. Through simple, clean ink lines and flat black shapes, Hernández communicates so much complexity: vividly expressive, strikingly realistic faces and bodies. The characters look like real people that you might know, recognizable even in 30-years-earlier flashbacks with a variety of different experimental styles (even in a brief period of time when both main characters had the same asymmetrical haircut).
The writing has a similar quality of being spare but deeply grounded and real-feeling. Hernández communicates big emotions in the smallest of moments: looks, body language. A page of the main character entering her reunion, leaving, and then entering again communicate so much ambivalence about her past and current relationships, with her relationship to her past self.
Queer Content: The main characters are queer women who are best friends and exes. This isn't primarily meant to be a queer text so much as it is an aging punk text, about the feelings of revisiting a particular subculture you used to be a part of as an adult who is now more jaded and more conventional; but the characters' association of the punk scene with their budding teen queer identities informs and intensifies those emotions.
bananab23's review
emotional
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
devrose's review
2.0
I DNFed this book 3/29/19 then finished it in January 2020 because it made the Barbara Gittings Award longlist. Here is my original review:
My not being able to finish this book says nothing about the quality of the book and everything about my lack of ability to read comics. To my brain I was just reading straight dialogue and not taking in much from the pictures. If I could have taken in each frame as it was meant to be read, I’m SURE I would have been able to appreciate the story for itself instead of having to stop early on.
My view hasn't changed since then. I will say that while others in the group said it worked as a stand-alone book, I had trouble keeping all the different people who were introduced straight and understanding why they were all important.
My not being able to finish this book says nothing about the quality of the book and everything about my lack of ability to read comics. To my brain I was just reading straight dialogue and not taking in much from the pictures. If I could have taken in each frame as it was meant to be read, I’m SURE I would have been able to appreciate the story for itself instead of having to stop early on.
My view hasn't changed since then. I will say that while others in the group said it worked as a stand-alone book, I had trouble keeping all the different people who were introduced straight and understanding why they were all important.
aliteraryprincess's review
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
flying_monkey's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
The Hernandez brothers, Jaime and Gilberto are America comics legends, and their stories published as Love & Rockets from the early 80s onwards chronicle the lives of the eccentric inhabitantis of a small Mexican village (in the case of Gilerto's Heartbreak Soup) and for Jaime, the unconventional residents of Hoppers and Huerta, two heavily Mexican-American neighbourhoods in California: the punks, the lesbians, the drop-outs and the losers. Earlier stories had a hefty dose of magic realism, even science fiction, but over time these themes have given way to a more straight realism as Jaime continues to document his characters as they get fatter and older, and either get more conventional or continue to let their freak flags fly. I loved this latest volume, which covers just a few days during which the two central characters, Maggie and Hopey, get together again, and leave their boyfriend and wife respectively to attend a punk reunion back in the barrio. There are arguments, reunifications, bloody noses and mistakes, and interspersed between are episodes from the very early days when the two first met and became inseperable, at various times friends, lovers, partners-in-crime and more besides. You're left with a real sense of what growing up and growing older really entails and what you have to leave behind.
Content Warnings
Minor: Addiction and Sexual violence
iggi_dee's review
4.0
I suspect there's something here I'm missing. From looking at other reviews, I think it's a history with the characters and story, trying to jump in here was too deep for me.
What did resonate with me was the nostalgic queerness and the complexities of the relationships between Maggie and Hopey and their respective spouses. It's good to know there's more of that material elsewhere... I'm just not sure how to check it out at my local library...
What did resonate with me was the nostalgic queerness and the complexities of the relationships between Maggie and Hopey and their respective spouses. It's good to know there's more of that material elsewhere... I'm just not sure how to check it out at my local library...
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