Astrid is British. She plays bass. She's seventeen with one year left of high school. She fights with her parents. She has a sweet hairdo. She is dreaming about her imaginary friends.
When I picked up Suburban Glamour
I thought it would just be about a punk high school girl, which it is, but it's also a fantasy story which I wasn't expecting at all. Astrid's dreams are becoming reality, and it seems like the creatures from her dreams are dangerous. The only thing distracting her from them is this new store in town run by a punk New Yorker named Aubrey who Astrid wants to be like in every possible way. Well there is that, and the fact that everyone around her is telling her what to do, telling her to figure out what she wants to be, and telling her to stop concentrating so much on her music and focus more reality (Wow I've never experienced anything like that before!).
I might be a little biased in my love of this comic book. After all, Astrid reminds me a lot of myself in high school, and actually a lot like myself right now. But then again I'm not a huge fan of fantasy and still loved the fantasy aspect of this book. Whenever life gets hard we wish for something else, thinking it would be easier, and this is precisely what Astrid experiences except she is actually offered a different life and has to decide if she wants to take it or not. Truly fitting for a story about a seventeen-year-old, because that is the age when you have to make so many choices. Where you will go to college, what you want to do with your life, and who you want to be.
The artwork kinds of harkens back to the Blondie comic strip. Not exactly, but the way things are placed and outlined kind of reminds me of that. The images are cleaner than the comic strip though, and light is played with a lot in this book. It seems to be moving in order of morning to night, but that actually threw me off a little bit with time. I thought all of this was happening in consecutive days, but towards the end of the book I realized this was not the case.
I'm going to give Suburban Glamour an A.
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