Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me
A Printz Honor-winning queer coming-of-age story about first love, friendship, and learning to walk away. Written by Mariko Tamaki, drawn by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell.
📖 First Second • Started 2019
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is the definitive graphic novel about toxic first love — a funny, gut-punchingly honest story from Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell that swept the awards circuit in 2019 and 2020. Freddy Riley is head-over-heels for Laura Dean, the most popular, magnetic girl in school — which would be great if Laura Dean didn’t keep breaking up with her. Over and over. The story follows Freddy through the dizzying cycle of getting back together, being dumped, and getting back together again, while her friendships fray, her grades slip, and her best friend Doodle watches helplessly from the sidelines.
The book’s genius is in how it never demonizes Laura Dean. Instead, it asks a harder question: what does it mean when you love someone who isn’t good for you, and how do you find the courage to choose yourself? Tamaki’s script is full of the specificity of teen life — advice column letters, awkward conversations, the small betrayals that add up — while Valero-O’Connell’s art, rendered in a gorgeous palette of pink, teal, and black, gives every character enormous emotional range. Her layouts, full of sweeping motion and quiet negative space, won her the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Penciller/Inker, alongside the 2019 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist and the 2020 Harvey Award.
The book itself won the 2019 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens, and a 2020 Printz Honor — and it remains one of the most beloved queer YA graphic novels of all time. It’s a perfect bridge for readers of This One Summer and Heartstopper.
Beautiful, wise, and never preachy, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is the book to press into a friend’s hands when they need to hear that they deserve better. Get your copy today.
