Summer Blonde
Adrian Tomine
Summer Blonde
Picking up from his earlier collection "Sleepwalk", and the precursor to his award-winning "Shortcomings", the four stories in "Summer Blonde" are quintessential Tomine. Memorably featuring characters such as Neil, Carlo and Hillary Chan, among others, these are beautiful and haunting tales that illustrate with great sympathy the loneliness and bleak humour of modern life.
3.7 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Comics & Graphic Novels |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
136 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0571233427 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
Picking up from his earlier collection "Sleepwalk", and the precursor to his award-winning "Shortcomings", the four stories in "Summer Blonde" are quintessential Tomine. Memorably featuring characters such as Neil, Carlo and Hillary Chan, among others, these are beautiful and haunting tales that illustrate with great sympathy the loneliness and bleak humour of modern life.
New edition. First published in 2002.
Reviews
The Financial Times
Emmanuelle Smith
"The highlight...is “Hawaiian Getaway”, about a Taiwanese immigrant who loses her call-centre job for “acknowledging the identity of a celebrity caller”. Her calls home illustrate succinctly the effects of her parents’ high expectations. Tomine has created gritty vignettes with crisp, clean lines and realistic dialogue. A master of the banal."
09/03/2009
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The Guardian
Craig Taylor
"Tomine's artwork is understated, and crisp and precise in piecing together the Bay Area settings. While each story is well-observed and carefully paced, it's the final one that hints at what Tomine could do with his next larger work. Set during the first Gulf war, "Bomb Scare" tracks the strained high-school friendship between a loser and a party girl and ends on a page of such quiet emotional grace it almost warms up everything that's come before."
16/11/2002
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The Daily Telegraph
Sameer Rahim
"Apart from the dialogue, Tomine’s downbeat but elegant style – he is a master of shading and stillness – brings the characters to life... This story anticipates Tomine’s best work, the full-length graphic novel Shortcomings which was published in 2007. In Shortcomings the humour is more pronounced and the drawings smoothed to near perfection. "
09/02/2009
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