This is Thompson's autobiography and at over 580 pages it is a doorstep of a graphic novel, but utterly compelling, expressively drawn in lovely monochrome.
Craig and his younger brother Phil sleep together in a single bed, suffering the everyday traumas of growing up as an outsider, strict Christian fundamentalist parenting and sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter. As he negotiates high school with its social hierarchies and casual brutalites he falls in love at Christian summer camp with fellow outsider Raina. She has her own burdens, a brother with Downs, a sister who is mentally retarded and an utterly selfish older sister who leaves the care of her own baby to her sister and mother. Thompson chronicles the tender wonder that was his experience of first love, wonder battling with his fundamentalist inspired terror of the sins of lust, of his vision of Raina as a beautiful angel set in contrast to his own self loathing. Blankets took me achingly back to my own adolescent years, it is stunning in its honesty and expression.
The title refers to a number of evocative concrete images, of a quilt created as a message of love, I know as a quilter the act of creation for a person means that there is an alchemy of thoughts about the person the quilt is destined for in every stitch. Blankets also refers to the thin inadequate blanket Thompson and his brother shivered under together as boys, that could in their wild lovely imaginations become a pirate ship but could also lead them to fight, to Phil being punished by being traumatically shut in the house's tiny dark spider infested cubby hole and to Thompson carrying a burden of guilt at being unable to protect his brother. Blankets refers to the snows that cover the land during his time with Raina, to memories of creating snow angels, of watching snow fall in the dark and of the coming of the end of love with the thaw.
Cannot recommend enough
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