Feminist Lit Feb: an #ownvoices book about an experience other than your own


content warnings: violence, death, homophobia, bullying, purposeful misgendering
representation: lesbian protagonist, sapphic black main characters, interracial f/f main relationship, mute non-binary main character, sapphic latina main characters, side interracial f/f relationship, side latina character, side black characters, side and minor characters of colour, minor f/f relationship


“I like ALL of you, Grace. Even the parts I don’t get yet. I’m not dating the 12% of you that I understand, I’m dating 100% of you. Including all your secrets that I don’t know.”


Yeah, I reckon I’m done with Tillie Walden, at least for a while. I read her graphic memoir Spinning last year and thought the art was fine and the story was good, but that the pacing and writing was all over the place. Despite that disappointment, I was still looking forward to this one because it’s such a different story.

This graphic novel has two timelines: the first is of Mia joining a space restoration crew, and the second is of Mia five years earlier at school falling in love. I didn’t prefer either storyline, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Both were very bland in my opinion.

Part of this blandness came from how undeveloped I felt the characters were. All of them were lacking sufficient personality traits beyond “reckless”, “confident”, “shy”, etc. None of them had any likes or dislikes, or seemed like they had any more life than a cardboard cutout would have. This meant that the relationships (romantic, platonic and familial) all felt equally bland and undeveloped.

One very strong positive this book had was the art. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Walden’s art in Spinning, but I think it really worked for this story. I also loved the colouring, especially the way that the two different timelines were distinctly coloured differently without it ever feeling jarring when it would quickly cut between them. As a matter of fact, I think Walden is a fantastic artist who struggles with plot and writing. I would love to read something were she’s the artist and someone else is writing.

The biggest thing with the writing that really bogged down the book for me was the world. There is so much clunky exposition in this. It’s not constant, which was good, but anytime anything needs to be explained to you it’s through a character speaking for a long time and it didn’t work for me. Towards the end when I was seriously considering DNFing I just started skimming the exposition. 

The poor exposition meant that the world felt extremely undeveloped. This is a sci-fi book in which majority of the plot takes place in space, and yet it never felt like it. Very few things were given sufficient explanation, and when it was it was through long passages of boring text.

This is an incredibly well-loved book that I don’t understand the hype around at all. Tillie Walden is a talented artist with some good ideas and diversity, but who has a track record of poor execution.