The Breakaways

Read this at a free library in a mall in maybe an hour, end to end. It was sweet! I know what the author was trying to do I think with all the interwoven vignettes, but Faith didn’t necessarily feel like a real through line. Cute story though, and maybe I would’ve appreciated it more if it were one of the first graphic novels I’d ever read instead of the nth.

Meh. I felt like this was all over the place. The characters were pretty great, a lot of diversity and what have you, but we really weren’t given a whole lot so they all end up feeling like half baked ideas. I understood the cutaways to Faith’s imaginary (drawn) world but a lot of the time they felt unnecessary and really pulled away from reality. It was a bit jarring at times to be on the soccer field and then abruptly in a fantastical world, delivering a message? I don’t know, the plot was a bit of a mess. The Breakaways is a graphic novel about a middle schooler who was tricked into joining the soccer team by the popular, older girl. What we find out is that there are A, B, and C teams and that Faith (our main character) has signed up to play with the C team, which is not very good at all. Nobody on the C team seems interested in actually playing, so why are they there? All the side characters have their own stuff going on, and it just felt like a jumbled mess. Maybe it was over my head?