Blue Is the Warmest Color Author: Visit Amazon's Julie Maroh Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1551525143 | Format: EPUB
Blue Is the Warmest Color Description
Review
"Julie Maroh, who was just 19 when she started the comic, manages to convey the excitement, terror, and obsession of young love-and to show how wildly teenagers swing from one extreme emotion to the next ... Ultimately, Blue Is the Warmest Color is a sad story about loss and heartbreak, but while Emma and Clementine's love lasts, it's exhilarating and sustaining." -Slate.com
"A beautiful, moving graphic novel." -Wall Street Journal
"Delicate linework conveys wordless longing in this graphic novel about a lesbian relationship."
- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press; Mti edition (September 3, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1551525143
- ISBN-13: 978-1551525143
- Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Now that Julie Maron's BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is coming to theatres in a feature film that not only won the very prestigious Palme D'or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and that it was smacked by the MPAA with the dreaded NC-17 rating for its explicit sexual content, and that there is an ongoing war of words between the film's two leads and its director, it should generate enough publicity for not only people to see the film, but to also hopefully discover this remarkable graphic novel.
Simply enough, the novel, written and drawn by Maron, is about a fifteen-year-old girl Clementine who is doing her best to be a "normal" young girl. She dates a senior at her high school, she studies for her exams, and she has the "right" friends. Until one moment of one day, as she's walking down the street, she passes a beautiful older girl with dyed blue hair, and she cannot get this girl out of her mind. The blue-haired beauty invades her dreams with shocking sensual and sexual imagery, and Clementine can't understand what these feelings mean. She just CAN'T be gay. She refuses it, and in that refusal, her passion for this mystery girl grows. As she sneaks out one night to be with her best friend, Valentin, who is a young gay man, they go to a gay bar, and Clementine meets the mystery girl. Her name is Emma. And from then on, Clementine, no matter how hard she tries, she can no longer deny the feelings of love and lust she has for Emma. But once they finally realize who they are to each other, all the other parts of Clem's life start to spiral out of control. Her parents refuse to accept their daughter's deviant lifestyle, as do her straight friends. Soon, all she really has is Emma, and for a even a short time, that's more than she ever thought possible.
I am cynical enough to usually not bother with books/music/films centred around LGBT relationships (or any other minority group, for that matter). It is usually difficult to create fiction in that genre without playing to the gallery, sounding contrived, self-indulgent, or disengaging to a larger demographic. Like (presumably) many readers picking up the English translation just published in October 2013, my curiosity was piqued by the runaway success of its Palme D'or-winning film adaptation.
Given that Blue is the Warmest Color is centred around a same-sex relationship between a teenage girl and an older girl with all the stereotypes of a butch lesbian, it would have been extremely easy for the book to be susceptible to the shortcomings mentioned above. Instead, what Maroh has produced is a first-rate graphic novel that transcends demographics.
At 160 pages, with at most 4-5 panels per page, it's really more of a long comic than a full-fledge graphic novel. The artwork is charmingly raw and amateurish (Maroh was 19 when she started drawing Blue), and the narrative is economic and transparent. And yet, the characters are crackling with life - when the protagonist Clementine falls in love, you too, will want to root for her, and when her heart shatters, so will yours.
Blue is often referred to as a lesbian graphic novel, but 'Clem' never identifies as a lesbian in spite of her great love for Emma, and it is clear from her heterosexual encounters in both adolescence and adulthood that she probably isn't one. But her sexual orientation isn't the most pertinent issue in this book.
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