Seance Tea Party (2020)
Reimena Yee
Random House Graphic
(NB: I tried to post a quick review to Instagram a couple of weeks ago, but it exceeded the character limit, so I will post it here.)
Oh man, I seem to be reading all the sad and painful middle grade comics at the moment!
A recent read: The Séance Tea Party by Reimena Yee: 12-year-old Lora Xi is right on that cusp between childhood and adulthood. She still loves to play pretend and make up stories, but she feels like her friends are moving on without her—getting older and turning their attention to more “adult” concerns, like makeup and boys, memes and politics. Lora doesn’t feel ready, so when her close friend Bobby remains out of contact for a while, around the time of Halloween, Lora amuses herself by having a séance tea party and trying to communicate with ghosts.
But then an actual ghost turns up—a ghost named Alexa who is just as lonely as Lora. The two pledge to be BFFs forever, with Alexa showing herself to be a true best friend in helping Lora through some of the parts about growing up that scare her most.
The thing is, helping Lora has stirred up things for Alexa. She can’t remember her past, but over time, it all starts coming back to her …
This book started off a little shakily with a bunch of silent pages: they’re beautiful (and indeed the whole book is in an art style that I quite love—all colour and little to no outlines), but I find it difficult when it’s not always clear who the characters are, what their main relationships are and what’s going on. For a good chunk of the beginning, I thought Lora was a lot older than she is—that she was a high school or possibly a college student.
Once the story hits its stride, however, it’s a poignant depiction of adolescence and the grief tweens can feel over not fitting in, growing up, changing and losing the person they once were. There are some wonderful scenes in the story that I loved—for example, Lora connecting with some older girls and discovering that some of her weird interests align with theirs, or Bobby engaging in some self-reflection on how he’d treated Lora. I liked the ending—particularly what one character says about adulthood—and the final scene seemed like a very fitting conclusion to Lora’s arc.
One thing that surprised me, especially given that Yee is from Kuala Lumpur and now lives in Melbourne, is that the story seems very American: Lora is in junior high (I think) and her school holds a prom. Having read a number of middle grade books recently with that sort of setting, it made me wonder if that’s what the market is demanding. It also made me wonder if non-American middle grade books will fare in that market just as well. The concerns are a little different as, say, the Australian education system is only divided into primary school, high school and university, as opposed to elementary, middle and high school. But hopefully there’s an audience for that sort of thing …?
