Book review: the Diocese is a rowdy picture book for young adults

It is usually pointed out that the hand that holds the pen writes the story, but in Linda Holmer and Ina Marie Winther Åshaugs fragmentary picture book for young adults ”or adults who once were young” it is rather the pin that has the preferential right of interpretation.

the Norwegian artist Winther Åshaugs barren blyertsstreck manages to convey the alldaglighet, but unyielding at the same time, not for the big, burning feelings in its expression of the intersection between childhood and the young people coming of age. Her imagery helps to give the story, based on a tonårsflickas internal monologue, a countless number of layers. But also to the realization that the human entire just actually fit in one color.

the meeting between the text and the picture from a collective of publishers who want to ”change the conditions of publication and textrelaterad aesthetics”. In addition, a staged dockhaveri in grayscale, where the grey areas, which occurs when the young woman's body is assimilated and subsumed into the body of society, are examined.

thus, There is no picture book in the traditional sense, but also no conventional, linear bildroman.

”the Diocese” is based on a kind of subordination in relation to the adult world, but also on the uncertainty that comes with a ”new” body, and new experiences. The knowledge that boundaries must be established in order to even know if someone exceeds them is not yet fully formulated in berättarjaget.

During the process, your body will be a battleground in a casual war of, and for, the privacy.

the shape when you press his sex against her in the crowded bus.

”Perhaps it is not capable of”, explains she. ”Surely I have the wrong”.

But, she thinks, ”it is only the hard that is on me. But he is not pressing directly. Or?”

the Event is illustrated via the, the view from the bussfönstret, where an empty park bench sits at a deserted walkway. It may seem apart, but enhances, nonetheless the girl's longing away from the claustrophobic situation.

”the Diocese” is set in the actual space between the text and the picture. It is up to the reader himself to fill in and interpret. The result is a rowdy, sometimes confusing, reading experience, but also an extension of the teens as such.

Read more texts by Alexandra Sundqvist, for example, if the ”Handbook for superheroes”.