I haven’t ever seen anyone else talk about Go With Grace, and I’m surprised, since this stand-alone graphic novel by new talent George Alexopoulos is quite impressive in its own quiet way.

Go With Grace
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It’s about a depressed, invalid girl and the mysterious boy who visits her through her balcony. Grace has an undiagnosed mystery disease that keeps her confined to her bedroom, where she writes poetry and fills journals. Her mother passed away several years back, and her father is contemptuous, caring only about the cost of treatment. Her younger sister Ashley somehow maintains her cheerfulness in the face of these family dynamics, becoming a little mother.

Grace isn’t sure what to make of the boy, thinking him a hallucination, ghost, or dream. He does inspire her, though, and teaches her to see things in a different way, until events cascade in a surprising fashion to an ending that leaves the reader with the question of whether it’s happy or not.

Grace’s room is a restricted environment that Alexopoulos keeps interesting by infinitely varying his portrayals of it and Grace. Her long dark hair changes in arrangement and texture with her moods. The indiscriminate time frame contributes to the feeling of uncertainty. Ashley wears a backpack and Grace has a television but the streets are paved with cobblestones and the girls wear old-fashioned dresses and hairstyles.

Although published in a manga-style format — this is a small black-and-white book, just the size of the reader’s hands — Alexopoulos’ style isn’t particularly Japanese-influenced. His open faces are typically termed cartoony, but he populates his world with plenty of detail, including costumes and setting. Most of the appeal comes from the variety of mood Alexopoulos creates in his scenes and the universality of the themes he captures: The psychological connection between spirit and body and the human need for companionship and understanding.

It sounds terribly goth, I know, or maybe emo, but it’s not annoying in either of those ways. I found it thought-provoking, one of those books I immediately read a second time to see what I’d missed and how my interpretation changed with more knowledge.

Alexopoulos has a blog and a website, and he has been interviewed at Newsarama. You can read sample chapters at the publisher’s website.

My new column at Comics Unlimited is now up. Click on the “Graphic Novels Worth Owning” banner to see my reviews of

• The Annotated Northwest Passage, collecting Scott Chantler’s handsome historical adventure
• The quietly impressive Go With Grace by George Alexopoulos, exploring an invalid’s friendship with a mysterious boy
• The latest volume of Paige Braddock’s soap opera Jane’s World, Book Seven
• The best Minx book so far, The Re-Gifters, by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew, and Marc Hempel