Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me

Dear Anna Vice... Laura Dean keeps breaking up with me. I put off reading this one until last night, despite receiving it on its release date. I wish I hadn't. "Laura Dean Keeps Breaking up with Me" (I'll shorten that to "LD" or "the book" if you don't mind!) is a story about a toxic relationship. Laura Dean keeps dumping Freddy at the worst of times, only to take her back sometime later. Freddy Loves Laura Dean, but she keeps getting her heart broken. The third time Laura Dean dumps Freddy is where the story begins. From there, things seem to spiral. Freddy becomes a bad friend, blowing off her good friends to pine after Laura Dean, who keeps, in turn, blowing her off. I can see myself in Freddy. I've been in my share of toxic relationships. I almost lost all my friends over my last one. I knew I was being a bad friend, but I couldn't stop, because my Laura Dean kept bringing me back in. LD (the book, not the girl) is a great story about leaving behind the things that you love that hurt you. It's easy to leave someone you don't love. It's harder to leave someone you do. It's got a wonderfully diverse LGBT+ cast, a plot that drives you to keep reading, and lovely art and writing. I wish I could read it for the first time again. 5/5 for this one. I'm glad it came up on my radar and that I was finally able to read it.

I had to read this a couple times to fall in love with it, but fall in love with it I did! This is a great story centering on the confusion of being in high school and in a toxic relationship that makes you a bad friend. Great for teens and adults alike. The artwork is conveyed in a limited palette and is absolutely gorgeous. Features "millennial pink" and several other hallmarks of what seems to be popular in art these days--lots of plants and personal details specific to each character. I loved poring over each panel. The overall page layouts were incredibly creative and well done, too. The only reason this isn't a 5-star review: whatever's going on with the pink word balloons that are coming from the stuffed animals is unclear. I thought they would amount to something by the end of the story, but they didn't, and just seemed to be an unusual/quirky/confusing narrative device. UPDATE: Upgraded to 5 stars because I just read it a third time and somehow love/appreciate it even more. It’s just a lush, gorgeous book. The stuffed animal dialogue bothers me a little less. Is just a quirky aspect of the story that I had to get used to.

I loved this book! The story was beautiful and very touching, coupled with gorgeous illustrations. Tamaki portrays the struggles of being a teenager in highschool dealing with platonic relationships, romantic relationships and toxic relationships with so much care and understanding. I only with it were longer!!! It ends way too quickly, the resolution comes too soon. This feels like the prologue to what I expected to be a longer story. But nonetheless, I highly recommend this book.

It's a good story about a young woman learning what is important in life

Good quality product

First off, as an artist, the illustrations in this graphic novel are TOP NOTCH. Every page i took extra time just to soak in every page. Wow. I want more. The story is very relatable, this is a situation many people have been in and its very easy to relate with Freddy. Freddy's friends are also written incredibly well, I could imagine their voices in my head as I read. The message about relationships that this story tells is very important no matter how old you are. If I ever have kids, im making sure they read this when theyre at a similar age to Freddy. What an awesome book.

I originally thought this book was rather good, but some reviews really put a few things into perspective for me. Obviously this isn't "liberal propaganda" like some reviews are saying. It's also extremely PG (well, PG-13, it's for teenagers after all) it has a hefty amount of underage drinking, and it touches upon sex about twice in the entire thing. The worst it gets is some cursing. And obviously this book is (L)GBT+, it's literally plastered right there that it's a lesbian relationship, so don't buy this with that knowledge and then complain that its gay. Which, if you're bothered by reading queer media or your kids reading queer media then please do some self reflecting. Onto the actual review: Now the one thing that kind of irked me most in this book was that I did get some biphobic vibes from this. This is totally personal, but towards the beginning when it was listing bad things Laura has done "experimenting with boys" was one of them. That was... strange. Not to mention the only outwardly stated Bi girl was cheating on her boyfriend with a woman. I identified as a lesbian for most of my life, but after a bit of self reflecting I realized I was Bi. For that to be portrayed in passing as a "negative" thing (especially from the perspective of a lesbian character) stung. I could have read into it wrong, so I really reccomended people double checking those scenes and seeing for themselves. My other gripes with this were that the best friend 'Doodle' was a rather huge part of this book. In fact it was 50/50 about Laura and the main characters best friend (aka Doodle) yet her character wasn't all too fleshed out. I couldn't tell what the purpose of her character was, and by the time it started going somewhere the book was over. I went through the entire book thinking she had feelings for the main character (Freddy) but that wasn't the case. Atleast I don't think so? If it wasn't apparent I'm very confused by that fact- and a few other things as well. I think I would've appreciated some other scenes getting cut out (it honestly was a lot of the same things over and over) in favor of showing the personalities of Freddy's friends more. Honestly, I probably would've adored this book when I was around 14-16 just for the fact that it treats being gay so normally (while also touching briefly on the casual discrimination queer people get. though very briefly). I'm just incredibly glad that, while it was a toxic relationship, it wasn't toxic because it was a lesbian relationship. I've notice a lot of media tends to feel that way. I know I can definitely relate to putting a lot into a relationship with someone who just truly doesn't care about you. While I've read LGBT(+) books that I enjoyed more, I'm still glad I bought this. It was surprisingly cheap for having almost 300 pages as well. I'm very pleased with the print quality, and the art overall is stunning. I'm already planning on rereading it atleast one more time to form a firm opinion.

Oh Freddy... You just want to pull her into a big hug and tell her to stop getting her heart broken. I thought this book was fantastic - I appreciated that where so much queer fiction deals with first loves / falling in love / coming out , "Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me" was a look at what happens when someone you're dating is actually not a great significant other! Freddy is very sure of her identity, she just needs to find someone who treats her the way she deserves. I really liked Freddy's character arc through the whole story and I appreciated that she definitely had to stumble a bit to finally be able to make decisions that were best for her. I also really enjoyed that there were multiple queer side characters as well and enjoyed all the side characters that Freddy interacted with. In addition to the writing, I LOVED the art! Super pretty, really worked in tandem with the story in a great way. I would definitely recommend this graphic novel!