Eighth graders Val and Lanie are best friends, fellow “weirdos” in the small town of Bolingbroke. Val is White and autistic; Lanie is Asian and transgender, but they have bonded over a love of all things geeky (like space opera and anime), and over their mutual outsider status. Then Val’s school project about their town’s most famous ghost story leads to an accidental summoning of the Ojja-Wojja, a mysterious spirit connected to the ill-fated agreement behind the town’s tragic history.
After that, everyone in the town starts catatonically following the directions of the school’s most popular girl, Val and Lanie’s bully. It’s up to Val and Lanie to work with a small group of other outsiders, who are strangely unaffected by the collective possession, to stop the Ojja-Wojja and save the town.
Val and Lanie are a delightful duo with great chemistry. Woven into the main arc of this graphic novel, too, are creative asides, sometimes delving into Val’s imagination and sometimes breaking the fourth wall to address readers or flesh out some of the many references to various geeky shows and genres. It’s tremendous fun, even as we also see a deeper theme about the perils of conformity.
This is the first of a planned duology. I can’t wait for the next one!
