Justine...haunts with its depiction of an intense kind of young female friendship that blurs desire and destruction ... Justine lives inside that old chestnut of queer adolescence: Do I want to be her or be with her? But even that doesn’t fully convey the full magnitude of the contrasts and contradictions inherent in Ali and Justine’s relationship ... I read Justine in one sitting, because I couldn’t look away from the striking intimacy of this friendship, especially since that intimacy is so consuming and often very bodied ... Harmon brilliantly weaves through the confusing, overwhelming feelings of repressed queerness in these pages ... Contain[s] excellent place writing ... In short, Justine is a tiny book of big feelings. It’s a searing debut for Harmon, whose prose and illustrations are both a captivating mix of spooky and lovely. It’s a quiet horror story in which beauty is a terror and friendship is an undoing of the self. The final line has haunted me long past reading it.

A tremendous book: deep, moody and dark, but not without a compelling breathlessness. Teen life, loneliness, sex, body issues, friendship, queerness and familial discord are all finely wrought. The minimalist prose and illustration are no less gorgeous for being sparse. Ali’s pain and her indifference are perfectly captured, and Harmon has threaded the right amount of pop culture into her tale. Pre-cell phones and social media, Ali, Justine and their cohorts pour through magazines to gaze on idealized images of women, watch skate videos again and again, ponder hip-hop lyrics, take whatever drugs they can, and navigate tenuous and exciting relationships. The tragedies here are shattering and mundane. An uncommon and incomparable coming-of-age story punctuated with enchanting and evocative line drawings, Justine is a highly recommended debut novel.

It doesn’t just share these types of experiences; it feels like they felt. Like dredging up memories I haven’t thought about in years. Remembering a time that was equally full of the reckless abandon of youth and the pressure to fit in. It’s funny … the whole ‘90s style, the aesthetic, has circled back around now. Guess it’s the perfect time for a book like this ... Forsyth Harmon stuns with her debut, Justine, an illustrated novel which, while brief, is not short on impact. Harmon is stunningly perceptive in her ability to convey the experiences of adolescence: The uncertainty of who you are which gets tangled up and lost in assimilating to who you are with. The normal teenage angst which often masks the underlying issues young women face with their bodies and their minds. The particular way friendships at this age are a complicated blend of admiration, envy, love, and hate. The mistakes made and the lessons learned, some not until it’s too late.The prose is amplified by Harmon’s intricate line drawings which serve to flesh out the story without having to say a single word. Simple, yet bold, these stark black and white illustrations help fill the gaps in the reader’s imagination while also spurring further reflection upon the narrative. One without the other would feel incomplete; however with the images and text situated side by side, the book feels whole.

Do we become the person we are through the people we seek, or do the people around us shape who we become? That question, often answered in nicely tied neat bows in coming-of-age stories, is anything but neat in Harmon’s novel. That is what makes the book so successful. The refusal to answer that question neatly is what makes Harmon’s novel so powerful ... Justine is a fully realized character, as she should be since she carries the weight of the title of the novel, but it is Ali that readers follow, much in the manner that Ali follows Justine. Ali is keenly observant to the world of Long Island, and to her home situation, never romanticizing nor chastising it. As a character, Ali doesn’t appeal to those readers who crave stories about people getting out of their towns, or people who love their hometown. Instead, Harmon simply portrays things as they are through an insightful protagonist ... Even in the smaller nuances of the novel, Harmon’s themes dig deep ... Forsyth Harmon has crafted a sensitive and observant debut novel filled with her wonderful illustrations that look like the teenage character created them herself.

The book is brief, but it packs a punch in its tale of teen angst ... The cover copy promises that the 'sinister' book will “spiral from superficial to seismic,” but Justine never quite gets there ... the queer undertones aren’t fully examined and the plot’s focus often returns to Ryan, the least likeable character, who somehow holds Ali’s loyalty. Harmon’s intention may have been to remind readers what it is like to be a teenager and not know what you want or how to get it...Harmon doesn’t fully deliver on the promised obsession and I wish there was more meat to the girls’ friendship ... Harmon’s illustrations yielded a mixed result. While her drawings of cars and butterflies felt decorative and banal, the daily chart tracking Ali’s weight loss with painstakingly detailed measurements is powerful. I lingered over the picture and felt the hurt of the young girl desperate for a feeling of autonomy ... It’s not fair to base whether you like a book on how the story turns out; there are countless stories that are still beloved despite sad endings. I guess I simply wanted more...Still, I would recommend Justine not just to Millennials like me who are nostalgic for their nineties youth, but to any reader who appreciates writing that takes teen girls’ lives seriously.

Harmon’s debut illustrated novel is a spare but vivid exploration of a lonely teenager’s complicated life ... The author’s clean, thin-lined illustrations add period detail to the prose’s cool lyricism, and though there are some mesmerizing passages, the reader glenas limited insight into Ali’s interior life. Harmon traces the nuances of a teenage female friendship’s fraught dynamics with clinical precision.

This is Harmon’s debut novel, and she also provides illustrations; she's done an impeccable job re-creating a very particular moment in time, exploring what it felt like to be a teenage girl when the beauty ideal for women grew to maddening heights. Though there was no social media, the expectations for how women should look were no less ubiquitous than they are now. Harmon’s words and illustrations together show how pervasive and seductive these images were, especially for still-developing minds. While the novel is short on resolution, it’s a propulsive depiction of what a summer in the New York suburbs felt like before iPhones and what a crush can drive someone to do. ... A novel that captures the emotional intensity, confusion, and quickness of adolescence.