Often after finishing a novel I say, “Wow, that book made me want to go back to the front page and read it again.” Well, for the first time, I actually did it. It is about so much more than just religion it’s one coming of age story in which everyone can find pieces of themselves. I know that I appreciate this part of the novel because the way Craig feels about things really mirrors my own life, but I don’t think it should be a deterrent for anyone reading this novel. About taking a personal journey to discover your relationship with faith, no matter what that faith or the result of that discovery may be. At the center of this novel is not losing one’s faith, but being able to ask questions about it. At the center of the story is Craig’s questioning of his faith, that until his young adulthood was a blind faith. Religion is a huge part of this graphic novel and I know that that can turn some people away. When one passion cannot be reconciled with another, how we deal with the force of that disappointment eventually defines who we are.īlankets made me really think about my own religious journey. They push and pull against one another as much as they make each other possible. This is a book about passions (religious, sexual, familial, romantic) and how they are at once complementary and contradictory. Craig, the son of very religious parents, weaves two stories that have a blanket at their center: sharing a bed with his younger brother when they were children and falling in love for the first time with Raina, a girl he met at a Christian camp. There is no sentence that sums up Blankets better than that, but there is so much more depth to it than that. All I can tell you is that I have never been moved by graphic novel like this and there are only a few traditional novels that have made me feel the same way.Ĭraig Thompson says that Blankets came from the urge to describe what it is like to sleep in the same bed as someone for the first time.

I was wholly a part of Craig’s world and nothing could have drawn me out of it. I have no recollection of anything happening outside of its pages. For the last 350 pages I was consumed by the story. For the first 200 pages of Blankets, I read slowly, immersing myself in every single drawing, every line, every word. Not because the ending was sad, because it wasn’t, it was beautiful and hopeful, but because I couldn’t believe what I had just experienced and I couldn’t believe that it was over.

I don’t know how to describe the way I feel about Blankets other than, when I closed its covers, it made me cry.

Novel blankets