
Fresh Start | Review
Fresh Start
Writer/artist: Gale Galligan
Scholastic; $12.99/$24.99
Grades 3-8
Middle-schooler Ollie Herisson and her sister are the daughters of a diplomat, which means they move around a lot, a fact she has come to depend on. It means she never has to get too attached to anyone at school or worry too much about the impression she makes, as a fresh start at a brand-new school in a brand-new country is usually just around the corner. Hence the title of the graphic novel she stars in, cartoonist Gale Galligan’s modernized and fictionalized autobiography about growing up in similar circumstances.
Ollie could definitely use such a reset after her disastrous last day at a special international school in Frankfurt, Germany, when she’s interrupted mid-daydream during an assembly by an announcement calling the school choir to the stage to perform. She only heard the word “choir” though, not “advanced choir”; she’s in junior choir, and thus had no idea what song all of the much taller kids on the stage with her were singing.
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Despite her excitement about moving to America to start seventh grade at an average public school in Chestnut Falls, Virginia, things get off to a rather rocky start.
In addition to having to adjust to things like American English spellings and our refusal to adopt the metric system, her new classmates question her half-Thai identity (“What are you?”) and some of them refer to her as “space princess” because of her flamboyant personality and her insistence on quite publicly half-living in an anime-inspired dream world.
And that’s on top of emerging issues that come with growing up, like getting her first period, buying her first training bras and struggling with her mother’s expectations of what a girl should dress like and how she should embrace her Thai identity.
All of this is compounded by the fact that, for the first time in her life, Ollie can’t look forward to a change of schools in the near future: Her parents have decided to buy a house and stay put for a while, so the girls can finally have a stable place to grow up in.
This all may sound like serious stuff, and there is a lot of genuinely dramatic subject matter in Ollie’s story, especially as things go on and Galligan explores the character’s family dynamics and difficulty in making true friends, a challenge that extends beyond her finally finding a clique of fellow manga and anime fans to hang out with.
But Fresh Start is also extremely funny.
Much of that humor comes from what a flamboyant goofball of a character Ollie is, never even so much as trying to fit in, and only ever extremely reluctantly submitting to the expectations of others, like her mother (“Don’t you want to…you know…try not to stand out?” Ollie’s seemingly more mature little sister Cat says when seeing what Ollie plans to wear on her first day of school, an anime-inspired outfit that loudly proclaims her love of the fictional show Quill!!).
Her fannish personality, her imaginative inner world, and her stubborn certitude of what makes her her (and what is cool) all make her an extremely fun fictional character to spend time with, whether we’re laughing at her when we see her through the eyes of others (even, perhaps especially, the eyes of her own family, particularly her sister) or laughing with her.
Galligan, who has a trio of Baby-Sitter’s Club graphic novels and the 2022 graphic novel Freestyle under their belt, is by now well versed in the characters and conflicts of middle school and in portraying that world in accessible, affable artwork.
Their default style will be familiar to readers of their past work, although because Ollie (and some of her classmates) are also artists, Galligan occasionally draws in their style, a more amateur-ish, anime-inspired style that they use for Ollie’s fantasy sequences, as well as their drawings of Ollie’s drawings.
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Galligan is a great comedic talent too, often filling the panels with secondary or incidental characters who have natural but pronounced confused or concerned looks on their faces as they respond to Ollie or the action in the foreground.
And then there’s Ollie, whose own reactions, usually to embarrassing moments, involve her adopting an extremely cartoony expression, including her eyes shrinking to blank pinpoints, her mouth becoming a long scribble that stretches across her almost chibi-like face, and the color dropping out of the panel completely.
Ollie will, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal, successfully meet the many challenges that starting over in a new, perhaps permanent place and starting on the path towards young adulthood present her with. And she will learn to be herself while still taking other people’s feelings into consideration.
It will just take a couple hundred pages. Luckily, those pages are all a lot of fun.
At story’s end, Galligan shares a generous amount of backmatter, including an author’s note talking about their own childhood and how it inspired and differed from Fresh Start, some short bonus comic strips featuring them and their characters, a photo album and a few pages about the Thai language and traditions that come into play in the book.
Filed under: Reviews

About J. Caleb Mozzocco
J. Caleb Mozzocco has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.
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