Blankets by Craig ThompsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Blankets sparked a fantastic family discussion when we all read this together in March. We all loved it, and we all noticed slightly different things.
Our discussion led us from Craig’s story and the beautiful artwork to our own lives we saw reflected in the book’s themes: relationships with family, religious upbringing, first love, and growing up.
My brother recommended this graphic novel for our Reading Family book list this year. He said ‘every time I read it I see some new detail’. Thompson’s artwork is amazing and beautifully conveys the complex feelings of his first love.
This is a fictionalized autobiographical novel, so we don’t know exactly what is autobiographical and what is fictional. But it doesn’t matter—it’s a moving story. Briefly, Craig meets Raina and experiences love for the first time, in a way that is holy, beautiful, sacred and eternal. But he also has to deal with his fundamentalist Christian upbringing, hard lessons in sin and guilt, and an emerging sense of his own identity.
I loved the decorative elements in the drawings, where scenes are embellished by swirls and crystals and paisleys. Thompson seems to be portraying less tangible things, including sounds, emotions, and dreams. The most emotionally intense scenes became the most stylized graphically, to where Craig and Raina are floating against a backdrop of pure emotion.
It’s this stylized quality that stuck with me when I surfaced from reading and wandered around in a kind of daze for a while. I described it as ‘wearing comic goggles.’ I find that a graphic novel like this one affects me much more visually than reading a purely textual book, and when I look up I expect to see the world appear as it does in the book.
My mom noticed the same effect when she looked up, from Craig and Raina’s world blanketed by snow, outside to her own garden where it was snowing. This is definitely a wintery book, and the snow adds some element of magical, inhuman beauty.
I found the beginning of the book bleak and sad, as Craig shrinks under constant bullying at school and faces strict parental control at home. He fights with his brother, has no friends, and even disappoints Jesus. His escape is drawing.
However, this bleak beginning makes the eventual joy and love later in the story even more redemptive. I found moments of redemption carried through the story, moments that reveal a well of love or forgiveness in the characters.
Only Craig’s parents, I thought, were never redeemed. They never seem to treat their son as a fully fledged person with a life of his own. Correspondingly, I felt that Craig never gave his parents full personalities in the narrative. They were cardboard figures who only seemed to care about their son’s Christian faith rather than his own feelings or aspirations.
There was a moment when Craig came home from visiting Raina—all at once the most hopeful, pure, loving and passionate experience of his entire life.
When he admits to his mother that he and Raina are more than just friends, his mother’s response is ‘If I’d known that, I’d never have let you stay there two weeks.’ Craig thinks to himself, ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’ Suddenly what was all beauty and light turns dark and secretive.
In essence, anyone who has felt the pangs of growing up, first love, uncertainty of faith, or the difficulty of finding one’s own way in life will feel moved by Craig’s beautifully drawn story.
