Maggie attended the same southern camp every year. The same camp that two female generations before her attended. Nothing had changed. Each year a camper is selected to be the Honor Girl. A high honor for being well…honorable. Maggie’s best friend was the best part of camp, until she met Erin, the older and wiser female counselor.
Maggie Thrash, author and illustrator, tells a pivotal experience from her youth, when she realized she wasn’t head over hills for The Backstreet Boys because all the girls were in love with them and they were hot, but rather because she wanted to be one of the Backstreet Boys. With a forbidden and secret crush on her female counselor festering inside, Maggie has an itch to release some pent up energy. Using the rifle range as her target, pun intended, Maggie relaxes as she focus all her attention on earning the Distinguished Expert badge for shooting.
Thrash’s debut novel is more than just visually graphic, but also verbally. She uses profanity and tells how the girls at camp took surveys about sexuality and virginity. Thrash’s writing style isn’t exceptional, but it does feel like a teen wrote it, making it more relatable. Her experience is raw and disturbing in the sense that adult readers will feel like a teen again, reliving that awful phase in life when nothing makes sense and emotions are hyper-sensitive. Teen readers will find at least one character that they can relate to or they will find other characters that relate to someone they know.
A new graphic memoir in the LGBT genre, giving readers a glimpse into the mind and heart of a real person who faced same gender attraction during a time period when adults advised youth to keep quiet about it. The novel spans one summer and a glimpse at two years after the summer crush,
Girls’ camp enthusiasts will be curled up under the covers with a flashlight, reading the inner thoughts of a fifteen year old girl and experience the drama of a summer spent at camp. So, what exactly does it take to be an Honor Girl?