“A now-infamous story on queer love that has unfortunately been made merely titillating and salacious from the film reviews.”

Jul Maroh (formerly Julie) offers a now-infamous story on queer love that has unfortunately been made merely titillating and salacious from the film reviews.

Instead, what we have is a story of a young girl, Clementine, challenged to come to grips with the concept of loving freely. Predictably, we have the array of supporters and doubters. There are few close to her who are willing to talk about anything at length: we all have our private secrets and shames. As a consequence, a number of scenes are highly predictable: the reactions from parents, the miscues and misunderstandings between intimates, the various pressures from friends, etc. As Maroh writes in their bio, “Intimacy is political.”

Despite these too-wrought episodes, though, Maroh’s pacing in the opening sections of the novel is terrific: they allow Clem the opportunity to languish anxiously. That said, something unusual occurs in the last 1/3 or so when we suddenly jump in Clem’s journals across a dozen years or so. Suddenly enormous plots of distrust, betrayal, angst, and self-doubt are brought together in just a few frames, and I suddenly wondered that–since we so easily erased the opening conflicts that unfolded over the course of the book, why did they matter at all? And finally, though we know from the opening frames that Clem has passed away and the story is being told in retrospect, the circumstances of that death are treated with equal rapid speed. Why? In other words, the entire resolution to the relationship that we had so carefully nurtured was almost dismissed narratively.

Nonetheless, the early story itself remains strong enough to be compelling and worth the read, and coupled with Maroh’s lush artwork, this is a potent story.