Review: Page by Paige

Page by Paige is the journey of bibliophillically named Paige Turner from wall flower to artistic powerhouse in full bloom.


Author Laura Lee Gulledge immediately wowed me with her delicate yet highly imaginative drawings, ignoring stuffy conventions of comic art and becoming more accessible to young women.  Paige yearns to be an artist, but is chronically shy and embarrassed to expose her innermost feelings on a page.  When her family relocates to New York City, capital of creativity and cool, Paige bites the bullet and buys a sketchbook.  Following the same list of rules her artist grandmother abided, she starts a months long journey to self-expression and transformation, chronicled in her drawn diary. 

Paige is a recognizable and relatable person, very well fleshed out.  She acts and thinks like a real teenager, and has problems that any young person might: she resents her mother's criticism, she wants to be liked but is too shy to stand out, and she misses home.  But things start to change for her when she is accepted into a talented group of friends that she admires: a singer, a writer, and a cartoonist like herself.  Together they go on artistic adventures that include graffiti and random acts of strangeness.  New friendship and drawing eventually allows her to become comfortable with herself and become courageous where she was previously weak.

Gulledge also portrays a completely realistic world, chock-full of references to real life bands, films, and contempory artists.  The end of the book even includes a playlist to go with each character, compiled from the bands mentioned in the book.  The amount of books available to teenaged women that don't depend on the sensationalist topics of sex and drugs (i.e. - "the fall from innocence") to carry the plot are few and far between.  I'm not saying these things don't happen, but I don't think it's somewhere the majority of young women have been.  Writing about the ordinary transitions of adolescence might sound boring to many authors, but with the right touch it can be both interesting and worthwhile.  PbP is one such book.  This, combined with Gulledge's attention to detail, and her stunning and surprising drawings makes PbP a refreshing read.  I give Page by Paige an A.