All's Faire in Middle School - Victoria Jamieson [Review]

Title: All's Faire in Middle School

Author: Victoria Jamieson

Genre: Graphic Novel, Middle Grade, Fiction

Publisher: Dial Books

Publishing date: September 5th 2017

Pages: 248

Rating

★★★★☆

Impy as a Knight.

Hello! Today I’m reviewing a cute middle grade graphic novel titled All's Faire in Middle School by Victoria Jamieson. I got an ARC of this at comic-con this year.

This graphic novel follows the life of an eleven-year-old girl called Imogene (Impy), who has

grown up with two parents working at the Renaissance Faire, and she's eager to begin her own training as a squire. First, though, she'll need to prove her bravery. Luckily Impy has just the quest in mind--she'll go to public school after a life of being homeschooled! But it's not easy to act like a noble knight-in-training in middle school. Impy falls in with a group of girls who seem really nice (until they don't) and starts to be embarrassed of her thrift shop apparel, her family's unusual lifestyle, and their small, messy apartment. Impy has always thought of herself as a heroic knight, but when she does something really mean in order to fit in, she begins to wonder whether she might be more of a dragon after all.

I really loved this graphic novel, it has cute drawings, it’s fast paced and hard to put down.

I think this novel reflects perfectly what it’s like to be in middle school, this transition between being a kid and an adolescent, this absurd need to fit in and fear to be alone with no friends, or weird, or an outcast. Middle school was definitely not kind with me, I had to choose between be true to myself or to fit in, and I decided to be true to myself,  and I think that it was my best choice, not only because I learnt more about me, but because I could find friends who really liked me for

Impy.

who I was.

In this novel, Imogene passes from being homeschooled to attend public school, and she has to make the same choice I did on my middle school time, to be herself or to try to fit in. She opts for trying to fit in to avoid being an outcast and bullied, but this brings consequences to her. She passes through hardships she has to endure and has to try to mend her mistakes, the typical mistakes any middle schooler can make. She has to decide who she wants to be in her story, the heroine or the dragon.

This novel has lovely and relatable characters, a simple but realistic story, and is a light read, perfect for a reading block; I read this in one evening. This story is perfect for kids who are going through this transition of growing up, like my young brother, sadly, he doesn’t’ speak English. I highly recommend it.