1. Erika Matteson
2. This story “Kiss & Tell” by Mari Naomi is based on her love life from age five until she is twenty-two years old. It begins with a small story of how her parents met in Japan and when she was born in the United States. As the book goes on it describes all of her sexual encounters with over 20 different men and also including some experiences with women. The main character Mari, began using drugs and arguing frequently with her parents and decided to move out living with her friends throughout the years. This is how she met the second main character Francis whom she had a long yet open relationship with, and shared a lot of common interests. Both of them begin their open relationship by experimenting with other couples, or individual men and women. Francis becomes jealous and doesn’t want to be in the relationship any longer. This scene of events occurs several times throughout the story, as she searches for the answer to who she really is.
3. The certain media the author uses to create this book is ink. She only uses black ink and white paper to show a intense contrast in her drawings. The characters aren’t realistic, but more cartoonish or abstract. The artist gives you enough detail to understand what is happening in the drawings, especially with expressing emotions. Her panels consist of small gutters so you are still able to recognize where the images are transitioning into one another creating her story line.
4. I believe the reason why Mari wrote this book was to give out a message as to how important it is to take care of your relationships throughout life. How you treat your relationships reflect on the person you really are, and how you may turn out in the long run. She believes that people can learn from her mistakes through her life by telling people the encounters she has experienced.
5. Personally, I think the strengths of this book are her drawings. The use of black and white lets you really focus on the small details and see everything more clearly. Also she makes the story easy to follow and understand, she gives enough detail to know exactly what’s going on without having to take up the whole panel with a huge paragraph.
6. Some weaknesses of this book would be the audience she is directing her story to. Most people wouldn’t take the time of day to read about all of her silly sexual encounters. Yes it may be humorous to young teenagers but it’s not exactly a book you would want to pick up and read again if you were an older adult.
7. I would recommend this book to people from ages 17 to 30 or so. I feel that anyone older than 30 would find the book to have no importance or meaning because all it really provides is a good laugh for people who can relate to the book. I would not recommend this book to younger children obviously because of the inappropriate content, and images. Also, this book easy relates to situations that women encounter all the time, so this would be most interesting to women. On the other hand men might be curious about the way women might go about things and their thinking process so it might cause some spark of interest as well.
8. Some other books Mari Naomi has written are “Smoke in Your Eyes”, “Frisco Al Fresco”, and she also has some online stories such as “The Bay Citizen-Drawing Clouds”.
9. I would rate this book about a 3/5. For the reasoning that it doesn’t fit all types of audiences.
