Justine
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Lit Hub and Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year
An "LGBTQ Book That Will Change The Literary Landscape in 2021" —O, The Oprah Magazine
A Vulture Best Short Book
"Piercing. It shook me, and it made me see.” —Victor LaValle
Summer 1999. Long Island, New York. Bored, restless, and lonely, Ali never expected her life would change as dramatically as it did the day she walked into the local Stop & Shop. But she’s never met anyone like Justine, the store’s cashier. Justine is so tall and thin she looks almost two-dimensional, and there’s a dazzling mischief in her wide smile. “Her smile lit me up and exposed me all at once,” Ali admits. “Justine was the light shining on me and the dark shadow it cast, and I wanted to stand there forever in the relief of that contrast.”
Ali applies for a job on the spot, securing a place for herself in Justine’s glittering vicinity. As Justine takes Ali under her wing, Ali learns how best to bag groceries, what foods to eat (and not to eat), how to shoplift, who to admire, and who she can become outside of her cold home, where her inattentive grandmother hardly notices the changes in her. Ali becomes more and more fixated on Justine, reshaping herself in her new idol’s image, leading to a series of events that spiral from superficial to seismic.
Justine, Forsyth Harmon’s illustrated debut, is an intimate and unflinching portrait of American girlhood at the edge of adulthood—one in which obsession hastens heartbreak.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harmon's debut illustrated novel (after the illustrated biography The Art of the Affair) is a spare but vivid exploration of a lonely teenager's complicated life. Ali's life is small: she lives with her soap opera–watching Swedish grandmother and her cat, Marlena, in a small house on Long Island in the mid-1990s. She develops a crush on Justine, the checkout girl at the local Stop and Shop, and begins following her lead by obsessing about weight and surviving on only fat-free yogurt and Diet Coke, throwing up when she's consumed too much, reading Vogue, tearing out pages of models and hanging them on her bedroom walls, shoplifting, and becoming part of Justine's small circle of friends. Ali also explores her sexuality through her attraction to Justine as well as Ryan, a boy who works at a gas station. As Ali's relationship with Justine develops, the group gets into greater danger. The author's clean, thin-lined illustrations add period detail to the prose's cool lyricism, and though there are some mesmerizing passages, the reader glenas limited insight into Ali's interior life. Harmon traces the nuances of a teenage female friendship's fraught dynamics with clinical precision.
