Books like Sacred Heart

(Between 3 and 4 stars.)Spoiler alert! This review reveals things that happen in the book.Though "revealing" things in a review of this book is unlikely to diminish the pleasure of reading it. Sometimes I like to read reviews before reading a book and I doubt that would have made this reading experience any less intriguing. It might even have enriched a first reading, as this book is eccentric, disjointed and layered. Then again, maybe it's best to read the book once or twice before reading any reviews? I can't imagine reading this book and not, afterward, wanting to look at interviews and reviews for help in decoding. So far I've read "Sacred Heart" twice and I'm still unsure of my interpretations, but here, a link to an interview that was pretty illuminating and gave me a lot to think about. Also, I am very relieved to see, in the interview, things are acknowledged that I haven't so far seen addressed in the GR reviews.http://www.tcj.com/a-conversation-wit...1) The first time we see Otto, he's licking the bottom of someone's sneaker (that someone with those sneakers happens to be sitting on the bleachers watching a football game, and Otto stands stealthily under the bleachers face-to-shoe.)2) The first time Otto and Ben hook up, Otto is wearing a dress. 3) There is a lot going on thematically with questions of love and care-taking. 4) There are a lot of references to horror flicks in this book.5) Music plays a large role in this book as do familiar structures of teenage daily life (which provide a sense of the familiar or the 'normal' even as what is normal shifts very quickly and the structures themselves are reduced to pure, pared down, naked, frame-like bodies.)One thing I'm really interested in right now is the way that this book honors the power of horror genre films to offer high schoolish aged kids an acknowledgement of the absurdity and unfairness of their social worlds, and to offer some small catharsis as the social situation is taken to its absolute imaginable limits, a kind of burlesque. And simultaneously, this book turns the horror genre inside out, takes horror and says, how can we humanize the concerns of the horror film? Because there are real concerns. It's a kind of odd de-burlesquing of horror and yet it calls into question biblical tropes relating to horror. There is a sense of humor here in connection to messianic religious beliefs and religious fanaticism (which often turns into real murder and real horror in real life, and certainly turns into real murder in this fictional world) and at the same time, there is a fantastically unnerving look at social structures that stay in place as a sort of unsafe safety net. In other words, this graphic novel opens up with a quintessential trope of both a coming of age teenage romantic comedy and perhaps a horror film? (I haven't seen very many.) The protagonist, Ben, a female bodied Jewishish cis-female type (ish?) person, going to watch a football game to see her crush, football player Dominic. What could be more normal? But this isn't a John Cusack situation. It's not Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's not Undeleted Scenes or Awkward and Definition, though we're getting warmer with Ariel Schrag. But only a little. Why is there a football game happening when all of the kids of this town have been abandoned by their parents, by all adults in fact, and when there are murders happening and life is as far from normal as can be? That's a great question. How is there even a football game? How is anything still running, how do people still have electricity and food and gasoline for their cars, how are their telephones still working, etc. etc.? It's not entirely clear, but it makes the book all the more eerie. Things are sort of normal and yet completely berserk. The kids are all going about their daily life, "mimicking" their daily rituals while waiting for their parents to return, which seems more and more unlikely to happen. So, how is a regular football game being played under the lights no less in this most irregular of times?...Hard to say. But that's how this book opens. By contrasting the teenage mundane with chaos and horror. Ben is walking with her dog, she goes to the high school stadium and catches Otto in the act of covert shoe-licking, and on her way to Otto's house that night to hang out in a very regular teenage manner, she sees a dead body. It's not a pleasant sight for her, but it's also not so out of the ordinary. Almost everyone in this book has killed someone or seen a dead body or is in some way accustomed to violence. And a lot of them watch horror films, which is different, but thematically connected. It's not that watching horror films makes violence easier for these characters. It doesn't. It's just that there is a layering and interrogation of violence, and our way of processing violence, and the kinds of violence that are systemically acceptable versus those that aren't. There are no easy answers in here, but I find that there is some underlying critique of our way of managing, categorizing and relating to violence, both idealizing it and fearing it rather than acknowledging its reality in a way that allows us to, more clearly, see each other and all these systems and cycles of violence we are caught up in. This book is working on many levels. We are closest to Ben and Otto, compelling, interesting characters and best friends who turn to each other as lovers at a certain point, which complicates their relationship in ways they are perhaps not emotionally ready for. And for them this is in many ways a typical coming of age story. But then they are set in a world that is uneasily dystopic and religiously allegorical. There are questions of how people present themselves versus how they actually feel inside. There are complications of how characters reveal themselves in terms of gender and sexuality and affection and how they do or don't gradually discover new things about their choices and behavior. And then, of course, there is that great existential premise of waiting (waiting for the big end-of-the-world type storm and also waiting for the parents to return.)Sometimes I think there are too many plots forming and Suburbia doesn't know which road she wants to take, so she just throws in a lot of roads all going in different directions. And the ending of the book did feel a bit sudden and forced in terms of resolution. Did Ben's sister Empathy, who Ben feels overly-responsible for, really have to be murdering all the guys she's hooking up with? And did we really need Ben to develop stigmata? Really? But the characters are complex and compelling enough and the art, too, that I look forward to the next installment.