Review of the Day: Fresh Start by Gale Galligan

By Gale Galligan
Graphix (an imprint of Scholastic)
$24.99
ISBN: 9781338045864
Ages 9-12

I miss when my kids had me read comics to them all the time. We had this whole routine where at bedtime we’d alternate between a novel one night and a graphic novel the next. This method meant that we went through a LOT of comics for kids. I always had a pile by the bed, and when we finished one I’d spread out all the possibilities and they’d select the next one that interested them. But while graphic novels for kids retain their popularity, even as other types of literature wax and wane, children grow up. They seek out older fare. And here I am, a librarian with a specialty in children’s books, now watching the hoards of unread kids comics pile up, pile up, pile up on my To be Read shelf. It’s intimidating. In a sea of comics, how do you know which ones to read first? One technique is to find someone tried and true. Someone with a keen sense of humor, an eclectic drawing style, and who does plots in their books that no one else does. Someone who is, essentially, Gale Galligan. They’re the kind of creator who makes comics that fool you into thinking they’re like everybody else, then hit you with key, fantastic, differences. Their latest? The best of the lot. Hands down.

Ollie has it all figured out. Because of her dad’s job as a diplomat, the family is constantly moving around the world. Never settling in one place too long. Never putting down roots. And Ozzie? Ozzie LOVES it. Because when you’re never in one place for all that long, you can escape embarrassment and shameful moments easily. So imagine her surprise when Ollie and fam plop down in Chestnut Falls, Virginia and she is immediately told that they’re here to stay. Potential catastrophe! After all, Ozzie’s an incredibly outgoing and enthusiastic person, but she doesn’t know these kids. When she meets a group of kids that share her love of imagination and comics she realizes she may have found her group. But when something terrible and embarrassing happens, what then?

Like many people I first became aware of the work of Gale Galligan when they took over illustrating the Baby-sitters Club comics after Raina Telgemeier (and how interesting is it that both Gale and Raina have GNs out this year about groups of kids making comics?). Galligan’s style probably has an official term amongst comic academics that I just don’t know. It’s sort of manga-inspired with a lot of the visual tropes in place, yet it is undeniably American to its core. As part of the Scholastic Graphix line, it’s not supposed to surprise you with shifting its style. Yet Galligan, to my surprise, got much more creative with her art here. At certain key points in the narrative, Ollie draws her own comic series, so we need to see a kid-version of what a comic might look like. But even more than that, there’s this level of sophistication to each and every page. Galligan’s manga influences are worked seamlessly into the images, sometimes going almost chibi, often utilizing a fair number of visual motifs and cues. Turn to any two-page spread in this book and just marvel at the way Galligan lays out her panels. We see so many comics published these days (such a start contrast from when I first started working as a children’s librarian) but it isn’t until you read a book like Fresh Start that you begin to appreciate true skill in the medium.

I love a graphic novel for kids that looks all light and fluffy and then hits you with some serious content when you’re not expecting it. Ollie’s struggles with being bi-racial, her feeling that she’s not Thai enough, and her friend drama… those are topics I’ve seen done. They’re important, and I’m very glad to see them here too, but I wouldn’t say they’re singular. Then there are the elements of the book that were a little different. The one that I was particularly interested in was the difference between Ollie’s relationship to her parents and her younger sister’s relationship. Do you know how difficult it is for the favored child in a family to realize that they’re really and truly their parents’ favorite? Particularly if they’re the older sibling? Cat and Ollie get along, but their parents hold Cat to standards that are entirely different than Ollie’s. As a result, there is a moment at the end of the book where Ollie decides to take the initiative and change things in her family that just struck me as incredible (and a helluva way to end a book too). It’s not that their parents are bad people, but they are uniquely flawed. Their mom, for example, has a tendency to use the silent treatment against them in a particularly immature and damaging way. It’s incredible to see.

Oh. And it’s funny. Galligan is also funny in real life, as it turns out. I’d never seen them in person until this year, when I watched them present in front of a room of 200-300 local educators from the Chicago area. Humor on demand is draining, yet Galligan seemed just buoyed with energy. That translates to the page, and just as the range of art styles is impressive, so too is the range of different ways of being funny. There’s just straight up jokes, of course. Situational humor. And then there’s visual humor, but that’s sort of a blanket term for the myriad ways to do humor visually. Aside from the serious moments in the book (and yes, it has some) the jokes fly fast and furious on almost every single page. I’m the kind of person who thinks that it would probably be fun to chart and graph each joke, noting what kind it is, how it was told, whether it’s visual or verbal, etc. Oh. You can talk about this all SORTS of ways.

Hot Take: Bullies are cheap ways to build emotion into your children’s book plots. They’re easy antagonists. You don’t have to give them justifications or backstories if you don’t want to, and if you do want to then you can feel good about being a writer capable of nuance. But me? I don’t like ‘em. I don’t like reading about them or getting to know them or anything. So when I see a book like Fresh Start I feel like its very existence justifies my anti-bully books stance. This book is bully bereft. Ollie doesn’t come to this new school and then have that classic encounter-the-bully-right-off-the-bat obligatory scene. And really, why insert a bully when the main character is so good at bullying herself instead?

Oh. And there are lots of facts about hedgehogs too. I was really trying to find a way to work that fact in, but couldn’t really slide it into any of these other paragraphs. Hence the teeny tiny paragraph here. Hedgehogs. They’re cool. And the one that Ollie gets as a pet is always rendered incredibly realistically, which makes sense in context, but was clearly a very conscious choice on Galligan’s part.

It’s just such a relief to encounter a graphic novel quite as good as this one. It really does strike me as a perfect melding of all the ideal parts of a comic. It’s funny, but handles the serious subject matter (how to take care of a hedgehog, feelings of shame, what to do when you hurt someone, parental drama) with a steady hand. The art is accessible and fun, but also is just as ready to draw its characters in the style of Animal Crossing avatars or as mock manga. And the plot is juggling about seven different themes all at once without ever dropping a single solitary ball. Look, it’s dangerous to go about saying one book or another is perfect, and I’m sure this title has some flaws in it. I just have no possible clue what they might be. It’s the gold standard for contemporary comics for kids. More of this, please. More of this.

On shelves now.

Source: Borrowed from library.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Review 2025, Reviews