An incipient scandal involving the clerk and his girlfriend forces Windy and Rose to hash out the politics of sex, which lurks just over the horizon for both of them their small differences take on outsized importance due to the forced intimacy and intensity of summer-vacation friendships. Here she reunites with her summer friend Windy, watching horror movies and developing a stomach-churning crush on the older teen who rents them out to the pair at the town's one convenience store.

Rose is a young teenager spending the summer in the same small, rural beach town that she and her parents, garrulous Evan and tightly wound Alice, visit every year. Out of their depth, do they sink or swim? It's a young-adult graphic novel, and young adults are constantly tossed into new circumstances by forces beyond their control, from puberty to parents. Immersion is This One Summer's strength, and it works alarmingly well for the story that cousin-collaborators Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki are telling. Against this brush-stroke backdrop stand Rose and the other impeccably cartooned characters, whose stylized simplicity (relatively speaking no sense that these are real people is lost) when juxtaposed with those wall-of-sound environments makes them feel like inner tubes bobbing in the water, or stones tossed in it. The lake, which is alternately drawn dominating a spread vertically like a monolith, suspending the joyous bodies of tumbling teenagers in its inviting murk, and enveloping them like a sunlit shroud when they no longer wish to be found. Trees and vines and bushes and grass and undergrowth, verdant, overripe to the point of hysteria. Wet, heavy summer rain, seemingly just as endless, pouring into puddles drop after drop. Bright summer sun, hanging overhead like it will never set again. Big summer-night skies, full of stars and moonlight.

In between, nature, as drawn with preposterous skill by Jillian Tamaki, proves capable of enveloping her without her help. At the end she and a friend dig a hole in the beach big enough to contain her, and she lies in it, posing for her last picture of the summer - this is how she wants to remember it. At the beginning of This One Summer, its main character, Rose, splashes down into her bed, holding her nose and falling backwards as if leaping off a dock into the lake nearby.

This one summer mariko