This week, in a further attempt to catch up my TBR, I read Tin’as Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary. I loved it. I simply loved it. This was the first time in a long time that I have read a whole book, even a comic, in a day. It was hard to put down, even when I planned on putting it down.
Tina is a fifteen year old at Yarborough Academy. For her English Honors class final project, she is keeping an existentialist diary which she chooses to write to Sartre. The idea is that she will explore philosophical questions and her life and her teacher will mail the diary back to her in three years. Tina sets to work thinking about who she is and learning how to be.
But, like any fifteen year old, she is going to face a lot of changes in the coming year. It all starts when her best friend Alex, an ex-Mormon whose parents recently divorced, starts wearing tight clothes, gets a boyfriend, and dumps Tina for a whole new group of friends. Tina suddenly finds herself pretty much completely alone at school. She begins spending time on her “bench of existential solitude” but before long she finds herself branching out and filling up her life.
Friend fights. Loneliness. Family drama. First love. School plays. Tina is about to learn that she is a lot more than she previously thought.
As I said, I loved this book. I loved it enough that I wrote down a few quotes from it just to keep in mind. Tina’s feelings were very accurate to my own past experiences and I felt them achingly along with her.
