Tamara Drewe Posy Simmonds

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Winner of the Grand Prix 2009 de la Critique Bande Dessinee.

Tamara Drewe has transformed herself. Plastic surgery, a different wardrobe, a smouldering look, have given her confidence and a new and thrilling power to attract, which she uses recklessly. Often just for the fun of it.

People are drawn to Tamara Drewe, male and female. In the remote village where her late mother lived Tamara arrives to clear up the house. Here she becomes an object of lust, of envy, the focus of unrequited love, a seductress. To the village teenagers she is 'plastic-fantastic', a role model. Ultimately, when her hot and indiscriminate glances lead to tragedy, she is seen as a man-eater, a heartless home-wrecker, a slut.

First appearing as a serial in the Guardian , in book form Tamara Drewe has been enlarged, embellished and lovingly improved by the author.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Bucolic British melodrama goes a bit off the rails in this wonderful, loosely modernized version of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. When a pretty journalist (Tamara/Hardy's Bathsheba) waltzes chirpily into a seemingly serene writers' colony, men and marriages tumble in her wake. Frumpy Beth and suave bounder Nicholas run the writers' retreat, which orbits around Nicholas's celebrity status as best-selling author. Then London-based Tamara, who's strutting her stuff post-nose job, moves back into her nearby family house. She soon pairs up with rock drummer Ben but draws attention from everyone else in the community, male and female: Beth, Nicholas, gardener/handyman Andy, American academic Glen, and meddling starstruck teens Jody and Casey. Simmons shines at mixing comedy and tragedy in a satirical ballet of appealing yet all-too-human characters who bungle their lives badly. But like Simmons's earlier winner Gemmy Bovery, Tamara Drewe is simply droll, tragic or not, and her mastery of British dialog and superb plotting make this a real poster child for the literary graphic novel. Or, if you will, the graphic novel for grown-ups. With sexual themes and occasionally strong language, for adult collections.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Starred Review. This irresistible graphic novel by longtime Guardian cartoonist Simmonds is roughly based on Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and uses it to depict the English upper-middle class having tawdry midlife crises. Beth, the wife of renowned author Nicholas Hardiman, runs an idyllic writer's retreat where she's parlayed her skill at caring for her husband into caring for other writers. She and her literary charges barely notice the locals who, jammed on council estates, look on with envy. Enter young Tamara Drewe, a newspaper columnist famed for her post-plastic surgery beauty. With Ben, her rock-star boyfriend, and her citified ways, she knocks Beth's little group on its head and gets stalked by two local girls. After Ben leaves Tamara, she decides the already adulterous Nicholas would be a nice lay on the rebound, only he falls in love with her. The art captures British frumpiness so well it's scary; middle-age spread hulks through this book like sad weight, but it's less skilled with beauty; Tamara's looks don't sway the reader the way they sway the characters in the book. But the view on how feminism has failed in moneyed Britain is priceless. A wonderful and slightly evil book. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In a variety of narrative manners sequential art, traditional prose narrative, and newspaper columns and headlines Simmonds (Gemma Bovery, 1999) tells a satisfying and complex story from the self-revealing perspectives of a middle-aged academic striving to write a literary novel, a schoolgirl with a crush-crazed best friend, the stoic wife of a professional philanderer, and a practiced femme fatale. Set in the idyllic English countryside, where a middle-class writers' retreat stands cheek by jowl with the only available hangout for working-class village teens, the plot unwinds with more eloquence than writers, let alone cartoonists, usually provide when telling of deadly cows, has-been rock stars, and lovesick gardeners. Simmonds' artwork, well-shadowed with clear grays, invokes and sustains the moods of longing, jealousy, self-satisfaction, and fear as the characters dance a multilayered but unconfusing reel of lust, repentance, forgiveness, bereavement, and distrust. Solidly realistic, Simmonds uses her unique medium to full advantage, showing what would take paragraphs to tell and expressing in a paragraph or two thoughts that wouldn't communicate as directly with images. Hers is storytelling that mimics cognition by overlapping verbal explanation and sensory input.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2008 Booklist