Annie starts her first year of high school a little adrift. Her brother has told her that what she does as a freshman will dictate the rest of her life, one of her best friends has ditched her and she just has no idea what to do with herself. She makes a new friend and tries a couple of activities before she finally finds something she enjoys, but all isn't solved by the end of the book, b/c well freshman year of high school is just the beginning. This would be a great read for any girl about to start high school. ( )

Annie starts her first year of high school a little adrift. Her brother has told her that what she does as a freshman will dictate the rest of her life, one of her best friends has ditched her and she just has no idea what to do with herself. She makes a new friend and tries a couple of activities before she finally finds something she enjoys, but all isn't solved by the end of the book, b/c well freshman year of high school is just the beginning. This would be a great read for any girl about to start high school. ( )

Annie starts her first year of high school a little adrift. Her brother has told her that what she does as a freshman will dictate the rest of her life, one of her best friends has ditched her and she just has no idea what to do with herself. She makes a new friend and tries a couple of activities before she finally finds something she enjoys, but all isn't solved by the end of the book, b/c well freshman year of high school is just the beginning. This would be a great read for any girl about to start high school. ( )

Annie starts her first year of high school a little adrift. Her brother has told her that what she does as a freshman will dictate the rest of her life, one of her best friends has ditched her and she just has no idea what to do with herself. She makes a new friend and tries a couple of activities before she finally finds something she enjoys, but all isn't solved by the end of the book, b/c well freshman year of high school is just the beginning. This would be a great read for any girl about to start high school. ( )

Summary: Freshmen year is tough: you've got to make new friends, deal with your old friends (or not, if they've changed so much and are ignoring you), learn how to talk to the opposite sex - all on top of schoolwork, the school play, starting a band, playing sports, and going to dances.

Review: Because my local library branch houses the district's YA graphic novels, that is what I pick up when I am randomly browsing the shelves, which makes this roughly the seven millionth and third graphic novel I have read in the past year and a half with exactly this same synopsis. Most of the others have something additional on top of that; some quirk of character or situation (a history of homeschooling or a fake peanut allergy or something) to set them apart. Freshmen felt more generalized, and it's not presented as a single story, but rather a series of interconnected 2-4 page vignettes. But, even though there wasn't much new to me in Freshmen, I still enjoyed it; Mucha's characters are smart and funny, they made me laugh more than once, and their problems are appropriately simultaneously OMG THE END OF THE WORLD and charmingly minor. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Good for high-schoolers, or for people who are at a safe distance from high school to get a little nostalgic about it. ( )