Orange
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1427814630
Orange is a 15-year-old girl with a bad case of the teenage blues. She complains about how everyone is a fake and how no one suspects her pain and how she has to defy the rules to feel like she is truly alive, but she never gets more specific than that.
As the story opens, she’s unhappy enough to be ready to commit suicide, note and all. But as she stands on the edge of the roof, mentally composing dramatic images of her shattered body, her reverie is shattered by the impact of a vodka bottle landing nearby.
The bottle-tosser turns away and staggers off. Her mood broken, Orange heads out to school, tucking the suicide note into her bag, but when she sees her savior, Dashu, on the bus, stone drunk, she follows him home and they start up an odd sort of relationship. She meets him regularly and even gives him her suicide note, revised to express her feelings about him. Some sort of physical but fairly innocent relationship is implied (she won’t let him touch her down there), but the emotional intimacy is one-sided, as she is drawn to him and he pushes her away.
Dashu is continuously drunk and never changes his clothes, although he seems to have money—he drinks expensive vodka and we see him signing off on a building to be demolished. He also burns all his drawings in a scene that would have been much more dramatic had we ever seen him draw anything. He chides Orange for dwelling on trivial problems, then says “Let me die in your place.”
If the story is hard to follow, Benjamin’s luminous art saves the day. He uses rich, saturated colors and strong contrasts, picking out faces and details with sharp precision and blurring the rest into an expressionistic haze. The result is both photographic and painterly, and everything from faces to architectural details is rendered with skill and confidence. This was originally a Chinese comic, and the settings and characters have a definite Asian look, although there are few cultural details to indicate the locale.
Benjamin’s characters drink, smoke, swear, make out, and commit suicide, so Orange is probably not suitable for younger teens. In fact, older teens may find the story most relevant to their lives, as the vagueness that is annoying to an adult may feel more authentic to them. Even readers who find the plot superficial, however, cannot deny the power of the illustrations; this book belongs in every library on the strength of the art alone.
I wasn't rushed when I did the review--in fact, I read the book through twice. However, the storytelling is rather elliptic, and on third glance I realized I did misread a scene: Orange follows Dashu home from the train. He is totally drunk and falls into the door of his apartment, pushing it open, and we see him lying on the floor. Then there is a shot of a pack of cigarettes, and Orange talking about brands of cigarettes, and on the next page she is making out with a guy and complaining that he smokes cheap cigarettes. The guy is in shadow, and I read it as being Dashu, but now I can see that I was wrong about that--he's not wearing the orange shirt. That's when she tells the guy not to touch her "down there." Reading the scene as being between Orange and Dashu, I inferred that there was more of a relationship between them then there actually was. So the commenter is correct on that point.
However, I don't think I got the sense of the story wrong. Orange forms a one-sided attachment to this guy, and they have a couple of encounters. She seems to want something from him. In the climactic kiss scene, she asks him, "Did you read my letter?" and tells him she loves him. He laughs at her, and that's when she turns on him--she finds the kiss revolting, but she is already angry with him by then.
She did slip him the suicide note while he was drunk, but I don't think that contradicts anything I wrote in the review.
She doesn't really meet him regularly. She memorized his schedule and waited in places he would pass. She slipped him the suicide note when he was passed out drunk. It not even clear if he knew who she was in the crowd.
It wasn't him that she wouldn't let "touch her down there." That was the other guy, whom she was making out with when he passed by. She is in fact revolted by the reality of him kissing her.
Were you rushed to do multiple reviews the day you published this? Did you just skim through the pages?