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Summary
Summary
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray's niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties -- Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn't fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones -- and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.
Reviews (5)
Spanish Language Review
El debut de Lee Lai en la novela gráfica es una maravilla introspectiva y elegantemente ilustrada, una historia profundamente conmovedora sobre el tira y afloja entre la familia y la individualidad. ... [Un] libro que cambiará el panorama literario en 2021 .-- "O. The Oprah Magazine"
Publisher's Weekly Review
The central couple in Lai's subtly layered graphic novel debut appear in its first panels as feral creatures with giant, elongated catlike eyes and sharp teeth, chasing through the woods with their equally monstrous niece, Nessie. A phone call from Nessie's mother transports them back to the real world, and turns them and back into women--anxious, emotive Rachel and reticent, depressive Bron. But the motif of transformation is threaded throughout the story of their family dynamics, and echoed in Lai's fluid, blue-gray illustrations. Tension builds: Rachel's sister (Nessie's mom) isn't fond of Bron, and Bron misses her estranged family but doesn't know how to talk about her feelings. During a three-month separation, each looks to their family of origin for answers. Rachel describes Bron's parents as "waspy Christian maniacs" who never came to terms with their daughter's gender transition. Bron's dad sees Rachel as "that angry Chinese girl." Yet the women's youthful us-against-the-world mentality is wearing thin: "All the structures we'd built together suddenly felt unbearably fragile," Rachel observes. Lai's cinematic juxtapositions and dreamlike fugues give visual structure to a breakup story that's heavy on processing, sharpening its edges. Lai also skillfully captures the ways family dynamics and histories play out in romantic relationships, and how heavy those legacies can land. The result is a poignant and mature rumination on how people change, and change each other, proving Lai a talent well worth watching. (May)
Guardian Review
Lee Lai's graphic novel, Stone Fruit, named after a nectarine on which one of its characters chips a tooth, is not much of a book for spring. Granted, its treatment of the unfathomable silences that can often be found at the heart of a family is magnificently unvarnished; if its minimalist, indie-film tone is ever downbeat, it's also, at moments, highly affecting. But you finish it with no hope at all that its characters will ever be able to resolve their difficulties. There is something intensely bleak at its centre: a sense, perhaps, that while blood is not always thicker than water, even happily chosen families may not be able to withstand certain kinds of emotional inheritance. But I don't want to put you off. Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist who lives in Montreal; her short comics have appeared in the New Yorker. This is her first graphic novel and it impresses from the moment we first meet Bron and Ray, a couple who relish their role as wild, alternative aunties to Ray's six-year-old niece, Nessie. In Nessie's company, they're at their best, the problems in their relationship made distant by her innocence and excitement. To express the sense of freedom the three of them experience whenever they're together, Lai has a magical visual trick up her sleeve. Exploring the park, our trio turn into furry beasts, all snouts and teeth: feral creatures who only return to their human state when Nessie's mother, Amanda, calls up, wondering what time she'll be home. Nessie, though, is a part-time distraction. However beloved, she cannot tether Bron to Ray, nor can she see off Bron's worsening depression. Soon, Bron will leave Ray, returning to the Waspy Christian family she left behind when she fell for her. She wants to talk to her parents - to try somehow to get past their horror at her sexuality - because she believes that only by doing this can she ever hope to feel truly herself. A devastated Ray, having no other option open to her, now attempts to get along a little better with Amanda, who has always made her disapproval of Bron uncomfortably obvious. The reader longs for a big thaw for both women, a defrosting that will release them into renewed happiness. But Lai is too much of a realist to tie up her story with a bow. "I don't know what you came home looking for," says Bron's mother, refusing to answer difficult questions about the past. At suppertime, the talk is of church groups, not feelings. Ray makes a little more progress - at least she and Amanda can smoke together - but the two of them are hardly soulmates. How can Amanda comfort Ray for the loss of Bron when she's still reeling from her own divorce? Lai's monochrome illustrations are, like her dialogue, spare and unyielding; she wants for a lightness - the occasional joke would help - that would imbue this story with a warmth it sometimes needs. But she tells her story with control and authority and it's impossible not to admire the way she has made a dextrous narrative out of so much taciturnity and mossy sadness.
Booklist Review
Athena-like, Lai bursts onto the graphic scene fully formed and utterly realized with this jaw-dropping debut. Her stunning artistry and complex narrative skills prove inextricably stupendous in a story about all kinds of love--between lovers, of course, but also between complicated extended family. "Things were best when Nessie was about six," the opening page declares. "We were at our best, for a while, anyway." Turn the page and suddenly three monsters-in-motion command pages of panels, filled with fine-lined, stretched, and stylized figures in a limited palette, until a phone call momentarily transforms one of the beasts into a woman long enough for her to tell a few lies. That "best" is wild, uninhibited outdoor playtime with young Nessie and her aunties, Ray and Bron. But reality proves unavoidable when Ray must return Nessie to her sister, Amanda--a single mother who begrudgingly tolerates Ray and is especially disapproving of Ray's relationship with Bron. Break-up feels inevitable as Bron leaves to attempt a reconciliation with her own estranged parents who, like Amanda, have been quick to judge and dismiss. Mourning pervades all the various relationships, with Nessie's suffering perhaps most poignant of all, as a young child caught in the emotional struggles of all the adults she loves most. Raw, intricate, and impassioned, Lai's resonating accomplishment proves astonishing.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Queer couple Ray and Bron spend their weekly hangouts with Ray's six-year-old niece Nessie running carefree through the woods and singing nonsense songs with abandon. Whenever they return Nessie to her mother--Ray's seemingly disapproving sister Amanda--the couple's relationship turns fraught and tense. When Bron leaves Ray to reunite with her devoutly religious, emotionally repressed family, Ray is devastated at being abandoned by the one person with whom she felt capable of experiencing true intimacy. With nowhere else to turn, she begins spending more time with Amanda and discovers that her own struggles have made her ignorant of the pressure her sister experiences as a single mother. Meanwhile, Bron, who's frustrated by her mother's refusal to accept her sexuality or engage in a conversation about her history of mental illness, ponders an uncertain future. VERDICT Lai presents a tender and emotionally raw examination of three women struggling to form and maintain their identities within and outside of their immediate family, illustrated in a loosely expressive style that conveys both bombastic catharsis and silent anguish with aplomb.