Abeer Hoque's Reviews > Kiss and Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22

I was excited about Kiss and Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22 by MariNaomi. It's a graphic memoir set in the Bay Area by/about a half Japanese woman growing up with plenty of romantic escapades - lots of boxes to check off in my own biased wheelhouse. But I was a bit disappointed.

My biggest issue was that there was no story. It was basically a laundry list of the boys (and a couple of girls), with very little self reflection. I got more of a sense of the personalities of the people she slept with and their lives and dreams and ambitions, than I did from the narrator herself. If there had been more space in between the escapades, to draw/talk about what it meant, or why it didn't, it would have far more captivating of a book. As it was, the going got slow and I put it down for a while before slogging through to finish it. The author says towards the end that she took til her late 20s to stop seeing herself through other people's eyes and actually become someone of her own making - all of which is totally reasonable, but that's the job of the writer - to put that in there after the fact, so the reader can be in on an arc of some kind.

I also found the order of the stories a bit weird at times. There was some jumping back and forth and some stories that would have made more sense if ordered differently. It probably could have also been shorter - it felt like she had to throw every last boy in there, which makes sense for a resume format, but not for a book. The narrator herself when she does come through as a personality is self centered and scattered, and I get that this is very teenager, and also that I don't need to like the main character, but when we have so little to go on inner-life-wise, it makes it a harder read.

That all said, I support writing about sex, writing about sex by Asians, and writing about sex by Asians in the graphic novel format - all awesome things, and I'll hope that MariNaomi's next work has a bit more reflection.