This One Summer

Overview

Every year brings the same ritual: a family retreat to a lake town, days spent swimming and combing the beach, and the easy companionship of a friend who feels more like family. But the summer at the center of this graphic novel doesn't unfold the way the ones before it did. The comfortable rhythms of childhood start to rub up against things the two girls at its heart aren't quite ready to name.

Told through spare, atmospheric artwork built around long stretches of silence and small gestures, the story follows its young narrator as she watches the adults around her fumble through grief, tension, and secrets they think they're hiding well. Meanwhile, she and her friend edge toward a version of adolescence that looks messier and more complicated than either expected.

It is, by design, a story without tidy resolutions. Sorrow sits beside humor, and awkwardness beside affection, in a portrait of a summer that changes its narrator without her fully realizing it until it's over.

A Different Kind of Coming-of-Age Story

What sets this book apart from a typical summer-vacation narrative is its refusal to soften the discomfort of watching childhood end. The girls in the story are still young enough to play in the water and old enough to notice things they can't unsee — arguments between parents, choices made by older teens nearby, the fragility beneath adults they'd assumed were steady. The book lets that dissonance sit unresolved, trusting young readers to hold complexity rather than handing them a lesson.

Much of its acclaim rests on how the visual storytelling carries that weight. Wide, quiet panels of water and sky do as much narrative work as dialogue, giving the book an emotional patience that is uncommon in graphic novels aimed at younger audiences. It has become a frequently cited example of the graphic novel form being used for literary, rather than purely entertainment, purposes — one reason it's held up in classrooms and libraries as a serious work of young adult literature, even as that same seriousness has made it a target for challenges.

Why This One Summer Has Been Challenged

Objections to this title tend to center less on any single scene than on its overall frankness about early adolescence. Challengers have pointed to its references to sexuality and to conversations among teenage characters that touch on bodies and relationships in ways some parents consider too mature for the middle-grade and younger readers who might pick it up off a graphic novel shelf. Profanity used by both teen and adult characters has drawn similar objections.

A recurring theme in complaints is placement rather than content alone: because graphic novels are often shelved by format instead of reading level, this book has repeatedly ended up within reach of elementary and middle-school readers, and much of the pushback has argued that its themes are better suited to an older audience than to the shelf it was found on. Other challenges cite its depictions of teen drinking and its passing acknowledgment of LGBTQ identity among secondary characters. In total, the book has drawn challenges tracked in 9 states and 22 districts within this catalog, making it one of the more frequently contested graphic novels in recent years.