PITY PARTY

“Dear weird toes / crooked nose, / stressed out, left out / freaked out / … / This party’s for you.”

Welcome to Bridger Middle School, home of the titular Pity Party. This grab bag of vignettes condenses a world of early adolescent anxieties and excitements into a single volume progressing at whirlwind pace. With the exception of the arc story entitled “The Voice,” each vignette introduces a new protagonist and problem. Here the mundane collides with the fantastical, real-world pathologies and privations made light of through magical realism and a healthy dose of Gen-Z hyperbole. An ill-treated loner wishes everyone who’s ever been unkind to her might feel what it is to be ugly—to disastrous effect; a thrift-store mood ring that never lies pushes a closeted gay boy to be true to himself. OCD spirals in the subway and harmful self-talk exist comfortably alongside a human chair, literal death by embarrassment (farting in class, oh, the humanity!), and social media followers dogging one’s every step. Not all segments resonate; the sickeningly saccharine Happy Head and Happy Friends ad spots and a too-blasé letter from the Department of Insecurity come off as a bit too self-aware while the simple, unapologetic absurdity of the ”choose your own catastrophe” misadventures invariably draw laughter but don’t quite fit with the rest of the story—though perhaps that’s the point. Swaab's illustrations offer suitably ironic visuals.

An artful, amusingly quirky tour of middle school angst.