Unlikely back

"260 pages of young love, sex, drugs, heartbreak & comedy."

The alternative title is 'How I Lost My Virginity' so we're into honest autobiography here. Somehow a better book than Brown's previous CLUMSY, this too matches fragile art and figures with delicate emotions and all the stupid things that we do early on in relationships. I bought a friend one of those Brian Ralph t-shirts that says 'I'm too nice' and you get the feeling that Brown should be bought one too. In a different art style, a heavier hand writing this bare-all confession of sweet love & physical mishaps would either feel too dismal and grimy or forcefully pathetic. Maybe it's the wide-eyed depiction of him and his girlfriend that keeps it all on an apparently innocent level. Like CLUMSY, you can feel the ending coming a mile off (well, twenty pages), you know what's going to happen but you sit and you read because you care and empathise.