"Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary"

“Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) is startlingly similar to “In Zanesville,” which I reviewed here on 1/23/12. Both are about young teenagers (around 15 years old) moving between childhood and young adulthood, experiencing the pains and pleasures of high school, of young love, first kisses, drama, great fluctuations in moods, tiffs with friends, and more. “Tina’s Mouth,” written by Keshni Kashyap and illustrated by Mari Araki, is a West Coast, multicultural version of this classic “young girl coming of age” story. What makes it stand out is that it is a graphic novel. The device that shapes the story is that Tina is assigned in her honors English class to keep a diary in which she writes about her life and feelings as if in a letter addressed to Jean-Paul Sartre. A quirky device, to be sure, but somehow it works. In general, I am not drawn to graphic novels, but have read and enjoyed a few, such as Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” Gene Luen Yang’s “American Born Chinese,” and Posy Simmonds’ “Gemma Bovery” and “Tamara Drewe.” In “Tina’s Mouth,” the main character (Tina) is an Indian American girl living in Los Angeles. We get to know her parents, her older sister and brother, her best friend, her big crush, her English teacher, her partner in the play she stars in, and various other relatives and friends. In other words, within the confines of a graphic novel, Kashyap and Araki create a whole world and a whole cast of characters. One thing I particularly like, besides the realistic picture of a young girl’s moods, problems, and triumphs, is the way her ethnicity is portrayed. It is an important part of who she is, and we see that she is part of an extended community of Indian Americans. But she is not defined by her ethnicity; it is just one part of her identity. I am also intrigued by trying to figure out how much of the pleasure of reading this graphic novel is the words and how much is the illustrations. All in all, this graphic novel is charming and engaging.