blue is the warmest colour graphic novel

Her mind is preoccupied by one girl – a tall beautiful girl she walked past on the street, a girl with blue eyes and blue hair. You begin to worry, “am I actually going to be able to read this?” Fortunately the dialogue is in block letters like a typical comic, and when Clem’s diary entries resurface, you feel more comfortable slowing down to concentrate on reading them.Ĭlem’s diary transports us to 1994, when she was 15 years old, the legal age of consent in France, and so the story begins exploring her burgeoning sexuality, leading to failed relationships with boys and girls. Let’s get my sole criticism of the book out of the way: it is really hard to read Clem’s narration at first, being written in that distinctive French cursive, and then squeezed into tiny caption boxes. It’s blue, which Clem says in her letter to Emma “has become the warmest color.” Likewise, it’s not quite accurate to say the book is in full-color: the lion’s share of the book is a flashback rendered in black-and-white. It begins when “Clem” has died, and Emma visits her childhood home to collect her diary. It is a lesbian love story that crackles with the energy of youth, rebellion, and desire.ĭespite the synopsis, “Blue is the Warmest Color” is very much a story about loss, life, and regret. Vividly illustrated and beautifully told, ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ is a brilliant, bittersweet, full-color graphic novel about the elusive, reckless magic of love. Their attraction is instant and electric, and Clementine find herself in a relationship that will test her friends, parents, and her own ideas about herself and her identity.

When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Clementine is a junior in high school who seems average enough: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school.

Blue is the warmest colour graphic novel