Blankets

Overview

Blankets is Craig Thompson's illustrated memoir of growing up in a strict evangelical household in the rural Midwest. Rendered entirely in black-and-white pen and ink, the book follows Thompson from a childhood marked by religious discipline and sibling closeness into a teenage years defined by isolation and searching.

The emotional center of the book is a winter spent at a church retreat, where Craig meets a girl named Raina. Their bond, built on shared doubts about faith and shared dreams of leaving home, becomes the book's central romance. Thompson uses the physical blanket of snow covering the landscape as a recurring image for both comfort and confinement.

As the relationship deepens and eventually dissolves, the narrative turns inward, following Craig's attempts to reconcile his religious upbringing with his growing identity as an artist. The book closes not with resolution so much as movement forward, a young man beginning to trust his own perspective.

An Artist's Reckoning with Belief

What distinguishes Blankets within the graphic memoir form is its visual language. Thompson's line work shifts registers throughout, from the rigid, almost claustrophobic panels of childhood religious instruction to the loose, expansive drawings that accompany moments of emotional openness. The book treats drawing itself as an act of rebellion, since Craig's fundamentalist upbringing regarded art as a vain distraction from spiritual devotion.

The book also sits within a broader lineage of coming-of-age narratives that use a single formative relationship as a lens for examining larger questions of belief, family, and self-determination. Its unusually long, unhurried form allowed Thompson to give weight to ordinary adolescent experiences, awkward phone calls, shared mixtapes, arguments about scripture, that shorter narratives often compress or omit. This patience with small moments is part of why the book has been widely discussed as a landmark in the graphic novel's development as a literary medium, expanding what the format could carry emotionally and thematically.

Why Blankets Has Been Challenged

Blankets has been the subject of 11 statewide and 22 district-level challenges tracked in this catalog. Objections have centered primarily on scenes depicting adolescent sexuality and nudity, including moments of physical intimacy between the teenage protagonists, which some reviewers have argued are inappropriate for school library collections regardless of their narrative context. The book's frank treatment of a fundamentalist religious upbringing, and its portrayal of a young person questioning inherited faith, has also drawn criticism from those who view the material as hostile to religion. Additional objections have referenced the memoir's depiction of family dysfunction and a brief scene alluding to childhood sexual abuse, which some challengers have cited as unsuitable content for younger readers despite the book's autobiographical grounding and literary intent.