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Ignatz Award winner Tillie Walden's powerful graphic memoir captures what it's like to come of age, come out, and come to terms with leaving behind everything you used to know.
It was the same every morning. Wake up, grab the ice skates, and head to the rink while the world was still dark.
Weekends were spent in glitter and tights at competitions. Perform. Smile. And do it again.
She was good. She won. And she hated it.
For ten years, figure skating was Tillie Walden's life. She woke before dawn for morning lessons, went straight to group practice after school, and spent weekends competing at ice rinks across the state. Skating was a central piece of her identity, her safe haven from the stress of school, bullies, and family. But as she switched schools, got into art, and fell in love with her first girlfriend, she began to question how the close-minded world of figure skating fit in with the rest of her life, and whether all the work was worth it given the reality: that she, and her friends on the team, were nowhere close to Olympic hopefuls. The more Tillie thought about it, the more Tillie realized she'd outgrown her passion - and she finally needed to find her own voice.
"Starred Review. An elegant, contemplative, and somber graphic memoir ... A haunting and resonant coming-of-age story." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Quiet and lyrical ... and deeply satisfying. A stirring, gorgeously illustrated story of finding the strength to follow one's own path." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Intimate and compelling. A quiet powerhouse of a memoir." - Kirkus
"An honest and intimate coming-of-age story that will be appreciated by tweens and young teens, especially those in competitive sports. Grade 6 and up." - School Library Journal
"This is a beautifully told story that will resonate with anyone who played an instrument, or did gymnastics, or got signed up for skating: these things weren't always what we wanted to do or cared about, but they gave us some focus when everything else was mystery and chaos." - Lucy Knisley, New York Times bestselling author of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
"Spinning is spare yet intimate, painfully honest, and oh-so-real." - Malinda Lo, three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist author of Ash and Adaptation
"This beautiful story about sorrow, growth, and triumph will resonate in every reader's heart." - Laurie Halse Anderson, New York Times–bestselling author and two-time National Book Award finalist
"Gorgeous and honest." - Faith Erin Hicks, award-winning author of The Nameless City
This information about Spinning was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, Texas. Born in 1996, she is a recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, a comics school in Vermont. Over the course of her time at CCS she published three books with the London based Avery Hill Publishing. She has already received an Eisner Award nomination and two Ignatz Awards for her early works. When she is not drawing comics, Tillie can be found walking and listening to audiobooks or asleep with a cat. She also enjoys studying architecture and tries to incorporate that passion into her comics. Spinning is her first long form autobiographical work.
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