ericawrites's review
3.0
Beier's art was great, especially to see the evolution over time. For the storytelling aspect, I felt her stories rang true due to how messy they were, but also most of them just skimmed the surface. It's definitely a book about dating, but the limited scope meant issues would pop out in ways that didn't quite add up or show their complexity.
amyhuang's review
4.0
As someone else who, like the author, began to embrace bisexuality only after leaving a long-term/monogamous/heterosexual relationship, I related hard to this graphic memoir about a woman in search of her first female partner. Still, I was surprised by the range of emotional beats the author was able to achieve: sometimes tender, sometimes cutting, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious—sometimes all at once. It’s clear that Beier has a lot of love for the younger self she depicts, even with that person’s own middling self-worth and unvarnished foibles. I was glad to see hyper-local queer stories and history woven into the larger narrative as well.
maiakobabe's review
5.0
Elizabeth Beier is a born storyteller and she interweaves her tales of trials and errors with natural ease and flashes of bright humor. At the beginning of the book she is fresh from the break-up of a six year relationship and ready to dive head-first back into the dating scene. But even in the wild abundance of queer ladies, nonbinaries and men in the Bay Area it isn't always so easy to find true love. Richly illustrated in black and white, some pages in a lose unconcerned line, others tenderly rendered landmarks that locals will recognize immediately. An impressive first book.
pipsqueaky's review
3.0
This was adorable, heartfelt, and at times way too real. I saw echoes of my own experiences in a lot of Beier's stories, and am glad to have this narrative in the Bisexual Canon. (Plus, there's just something about reading a story that's set where you live; I, too, have been overwhelmed by all the hot dancing ladies at Cockblock. Up top.)
jsjammersmith's review
5.0
Elizabeth Beier reminds me why it's so beautiful to be a queer person. Why it's important to communicate your experiences as a queer person, whether it's your successes, your perceived failures, your actual failures, or you general desires for your own identity being queer is being human which means being complex.
I received this book as a Christmas present from two friends (and I didn't get them anything back and I know I suck for that) and I read this over a snow day. I couldn't put it down. It's not enough that Beer is an approachable writer and artist, she just writes with a pure honesty. Rather than try and write a discourse about her queer identity, instead Beier writes honestly about her experiences and desires to have a relationship with another woman after her break-up with her boyfriend. The book is one long list of trials (and mostly failures) with women until she finds the right person in a beautiful butch woman who loves her back.
Books like this are important, not just to queer readers like me, but to lovers of comics as well. This book will probably strike some readers as sloppy, but the looseness of the style really speaks to the tone of this book. Beier isn't constructing an elaborate narrative. Her story is messy and her experiences are loose and freeform therefore the arrangement of the pages are as such. Beier seems to understand that comics is just as much the words as it is the images that accompany them along with the arrangement of the images. Reading this book can sometimes be difficult, but the arrangement allows the reader to feel that their reading/listening to someone just riffing.
A queer woman just communicating her experiences, desires, failures, and victories is not the stuff of epic poetry and award-winning novels. But it doesn't have to be. This book is simply about desire, and how we're guided by it to become something we want to be: complete and happy.
I received this book as a Christmas present from two friends (and I didn't get them anything back and I know I suck for that) and I read this over a snow day. I couldn't put it down. It's not enough that Beer is an approachable writer and artist, she just writes with a pure honesty. Rather than try and write a discourse about her queer identity, instead Beier writes honestly about her experiences and desires to have a relationship with another woman after her break-up with her boyfriend. The book is one long list of trials (and mostly failures) with women until she finds the right person in a beautiful butch woman who loves her back.
Books like this are important, not just to queer readers like me, but to lovers of comics as well. This book will probably strike some readers as sloppy, but the looseness of the style really speaks to the tone of this book. Beier isn't constructing an elaborate narrative. Her story is messy and her experiences are loose and freeform therefore the arrangement of the pages are as such. Beier seems to understand that comics is just as much the words as it is the images that accompany them along with the arrangement of the images. Reading this book can sometimes be difficult, but the arrangement allows the reader to feel that their reading/listening to someone just riffing.
A queer woman just communicating her experiences, desires, failures, and victories is not the stuff of epic poetry and award-winning novels. But it doesn't have to be. This book is simply about desire, and how we're guided by it to become something we want to be: complete and happy.
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