Middle school is a dangerous battlefield, even on the good days.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Svetlana Chmakova
What They Say
In his daydreams, Jensen is the biggest hero that ever was, saving the world and his friends on a daily basis. But his middle school reality is VERY different – math is hard, getting along with friends is hard…Even finding a partner for the class project is a big problem when you always get picked last. And the pressure’s on even more once the school newspaper’s dynamic duo, Jenny and Akilah, draw Jensen into the whirlwind of school news, social experiment projects, and behind-the-scenes club drama. Jensen’s always played the middle school game one level at a time, but suddenly, someone’s cranked up the difficulty setting. Will those daring daydreams of his finally work in his favor, or will he have to find real solutions to his real life problems?
The charming world of Berrybrook Middle School gets a little bigger in this highly anticipated follow up to Svetlana Chmakova’s award winning Awkward with a story about a boy who learns his own way of being Brave!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Let me start by saying I am not the target audience for Brave. I am an adult woman who, once in her life, could have really used a book like this. I don’t know if Chmakova was ever bullied, but she does a spot on job of portraying it.
Brave follows the daily school life of Jensen, a heavy middle-schooler who dreams of one day becoming an astronaut and saving the world from sunspots. He’s very much still in the elementary school mindset, naive to a fault and good-natured, and he’s what anyone could look at and say is an easy target for bullying.
It takes him a long time to realize that what is happening to him is bullying. Jensen mentally compares his school life to playing a dungeon crawling video game. Non-confrontational, he runs the gauntlet every day trying to avoid those people who make him feel bad. The end of each day is the reward of either art club or eventually the newspaper. He gets lost in plenty of daydreams, his coping mechanism for both the bullies and the classes he’s not particularly good at.
Kids can be downright shitty, middle-schoolers especially. There’s just something about puberty that brings out the worst in people. I too was the artsy kid who was bad at math. I too was singled out and bullied in 7th grade. However, that was twenty years ago, prior to a pushback from school administrations on the real issues involving bullying. The teachers simply didn’t know how to deal with the situations back then, and there were no smartphones to capture the bad behavior. Even after being called into the administrator’s office the bullies kept at it. Unless a fistfight happened right in front of them, they didn’t know what to do. Hell, most still don’t know what to do or this book wouldn’t exist.
The part in this book where Jensen finds some safety hiding in the shadow of Jorge? I had a Jorge, her name was Erin. I met her when we ended up grouped up in English, and my first impression of her was the same as Jensen has or Jorge. I made friends with a girl who wore steel-toed combat boots who took shit from no one. When my own personal hell of bullies targeted me, I tried to keep as close to her as possible. Yes, that tactic works. Unlike Jensen, I had a large number of friends, but we were spread out most of the time. Once my personal tormentors realized how large my group of friends was they got off my back, and eventually, they gave up. For kids without a large group of friends to use as security? They end up like Jensen.
With the story being from Jensen’s perspective we don’t get the full scoop on everything going on. He’s the lead character but he’s not the focal point of the action. In fact, a major incident that occurs later in the book has nothing to do with him at all, and it has nothing to do with bullying. (Even more shockingly, the one character you’d think would be an obvious target for bullying is never one. I know the author was likely trying not to open the ugly can of racism/bigotry, but in reality, those kids would be targets as well.)
Here’s what makes the way this story is told interesting. We follow Jensen’s life as it unfolds over the course of a couple of months. Time isn’t condensed down into a neatly compact week. Events happen around him and we get snippets of the incidents. Jensen slowly comes to realize what’s happening to him with the help of the kids who are busy doing a report on bullying, and the changes in Jensen and the other students are realistically slow. In fact, it feels like reading through a journal. It’s grounded in a way that seems rare, although maybe not perfect. While I don’t doubt there are kids out there like Jenny and Akilah, they’re just a bit too smart. (Then again, kids are smarter these days than when I was in middle school.)
Svetlana Chmakova has settled into a nice cartoony style for her Berrybrook Middle School books. While clearly manga inspired it also has strong western roots. Her cast of characters are diverse (certainly more diverse than my extremely white middle school ever was) and yet it manages to stay away from stereotypes while giving each character a personality. Each one of her fictional students feels well-realized, even when it’s only a few frames of poses, which Chmakova talks about briefly in the extras at the end of the book.
In Summary
Unlike so many comics written for and aimed at kids this age, Brave comes across as actually capturing the feel of real kids and the experiences of middle school and the pressure within. Sure, the focus is on bullying and Jensen slowly realizing the greater forces at work to make his life miserable, but it’s not just about him and there are no silver bullets for solving a very complex situation. While the story never gets preachy, it does get surprisingly technical at some points, and it does feel a touch unfocused when it introduces a B-plot towards the later half of the book. However, it keeps the story feeling fresh and more realistic. Everyone is the star of their own story, but rarely are we the focus of everything happening around us. Brave never forgets that, and that’s part of what keeps this comic feeling more real than most. It’s the sort of story I wish I had been able to read in middle school, and one I wish I could stick in a time machine and send back to the school administrators from 1993.
Content Grade: A –
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: N/A
Age Rating: All Ages
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: May 23rd, 2017
MSRP: $24.00
