After camp they exchange letters and he is allowed to visit her upper Michigan home for almost a week. And he’s physically attracted to her, which is something he struggles with against the backdrop of a religion that forbids this very attraction as the sin of lust. But it's a promise also filled with dark threats of Hell at one point, led by a suggestion from his teachers that art is selfish, un-Christian, the darkly intense Craig burns all of his artwork.ġ6, at a Bible summer camp, Craig meets and falls in love with Raina, a kind of ethereal beauty whom he fancies is like him, a loner, into nature, increasingly less into organized religion. He for a time willingly turns to his parents’ fundamentalist religion as a kind of escape from the world, with that promise of Heaven, and considers the encouragement from his pastor that he, a thoughtful, earnest boy, follow the ministerial calling. Thompson’s story might be described as autobiographical fiction set in Wisconsin, where he grew up with his controlling parents and his brother Phil, art and fantasy (he calls it dreaming) and hangin' with his bro are his escapes.Ĭraig can’t choose what he reads or sees on television. Powerful, gorgeous, touching, expressive, it’s among other things a meditation on first or young love, with sweeping and /or anguished art accomplished in the romantic tradition, with all the emotional highs and lows of young love. I might go so far as to say it is one of the top ten or twenty graphic novels of all time. Every year I teach this book in my YA course it comes up as one of the top three favorite texts in the course.

Blankets novel