Callie is the head of set design for her middle school’s spring musical, and such an ambitious theater geek that she explodes a cannon onstage in a perfect comic book “KA-BOOM.” This former tech director can testify to the authenticity of Telgemeier’s backstage world, where friendship and romance flourish in the intimate monotony of snack runs, flat-painting and cue-calling.Ĭallie works hard on the tech crew while facing the standard tween tribulations: her little brother snoops in her room, clueless grown-ups ask stupid questions, and cute boys are distractingly fickle. Her latest, and more sophisticated, hobbies-before-hotties book, “Drama,” trades braces for another staple of geek youth - the theater tech crew.

And that affected the way other people saw me!” Cynical, Telgemeier is not. The book had a hyper-sincere moral: “The more I focused on my interests, the more it brought out things I liked about myself. A sixth grader and a Girl Scout, Raina trips and knocks her front teeth out of place, which leads to a four-and-a-half-year ordeal of braces, false teeth, retainers and headgear. Telgemeier’s charming “Smile,” an autobiographical account of her junior high orthodontic treatment, was a best seller when it came out in 2010. But this is a narrative belied by the thriving field of age-appropriate books epitomized by the nice-girls-finish-first graphic novels of Raina Telgemeier, poetic illustrator of middle-school life.

The parenting-book world is flooded with jeremiads about how tween culture breeds sociopaths and prostitots, ergo we should unplug the Internet.

Drama by raina telgemeier