Two distinctly dissimilar sisters react very differently to an alien invasion in this tremendous middle-grade graphic novel about what it means to be "normal."
The Seaver sisters--popular high school freshman Al and 10-year-old sci-fi lover and school "freak" Mary--couldn't be more unalike. Most importantly, the peachy-skinned girls don't agree that aliens have invaded their hometown. Then Mary is attacked by one. And Al? She unleashes her secret superpowers and defeats it. Turns out, Al was adopted from aliens but is simply trying to be a "normal, boring teenager." Unfortunately, her abilities have now been reactivated and she keeps losing control. Al just wants to find where she fits: with the dress-shopping, dance-fevered, school championship-loving crowd, or with brown-skinned nonbinary short-film maker and sci-fi artist "witch" Meg, with whom Al feels comfortable. But Mary keeps finding ominous extraterrestrial warnings that Al ignores, leaving Mary to conclude she'll have to save her "butthead" sister herself.
My Sister, the Freak by artist and writer Dani Jones, illustrator of the PopularMMOs series, is upbeat and uproarious. Jones's lively, thickly lined art has a cartoon-like quality reminiscent of Dan Santat and Raina Telgemeier and her use of light allows for Al's epic superpowered battles to glow gorgeously. The visual humor is admirably, unabashedly hammy and features classic onomatopoeia as well as tongue-in-cheek jokes (one girl woefully settles for "Mild Jared" over "Hot Jared"). There are gasp-worthy twists, snippets from Mary's own comics, and a budding queer romance. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer