Weirdo, uses real-life against a graphic novel setting with heart and fun

Middle school has the potential to suck. Countless variables determine if you find your people early or meander through three years of school and life. By eighth grade you’re certainly ready for high school, but is it because you hit the wall or you’re ready a bigger, more appropriate challenge? There is a lot of that in Weirdo. I also feel a lot of ‘reviewer’s remorse’ now because Weirdo has been silently judging me from my book queue for a while.

Weirdo was released in September 2024. Here at Daddy Mojo we love to recommend books that kids in school would enjoy reading. We try to do so in a timely manner. There are some young readers who want to be the first to discover something that’s the topic of the school water fountain. Weirdo is a graphic novel that kids will enjoy reading and will be the book that their people talk about. It’s funny and has that ‘real’ quality middle-grade kids crave and need, all the while being something that they can learn from.

Woah, ‘learn from’ sounds educational, I knew there was a reason the book was judging you in your sleep. Hold on young reader, this is the best kind of learning that you do. It’s the way you want to learn, insofar as it’s learning through observing. Parents and teachers will tell you things and you won’t listen. They could warn you to watch out for the mud puddle and you’d claim that you’re suddenly made of duck feathers. However, if you see one of your peers make a mistake (hopefully…) you’ll silently learn from them.

Parents or teachers will tell you stories that their classmates were jerks. Back in the stone ages, when kids didn’t have cell phones, there were still bullies, teachers who were the weirdest people on Earth, girls who you had a crush on and people who you didn’t know, but who had a lot in common with you. Those people were ones that your elders had to navigate around.

Weirdo is also semi-autobiographical. The main character is Tony Weaver, Jr., a seventh grader whose life is full of challenges. He’s about to transfer schools; which is rarely a good sign, to a new place that’s more academic. It presents school as a series of challenges for its students to overcome. This new school won’t last long, because aside from being far less creative than Weaver, it has the same societal clicks as his previous one. Weaver goes to a third school, whose outward appearance is stricter, but might offer some hope for this early teen who is looking for direction.

The students are more welcoming and some clubs actively market towards them. He’s into comics and quickly finds the literature club. Parallel to this, Weaver has started to see a clinical psychologist. Weaver has had some suicidal thoughts and hasn’t found his groove or perceived friend group, as easily as his sister. If this story sounds familiar it’s because every single kid I know has dealt with one of these issues in middle or high school.

It’s scary and raises internal alarms when you mention suicide or self-harm, but it rears its head daily in high school. The school I’m working at now has a club devoted to it with a sizable number of kids, across social groups, attending their events. That topic is present in Weirdo, but only for two pages. It underlies the stress that today’s kids go through in middle and high school. Either real or perceived, it’s there and impacting kids to where it’s no big deal to see a clinical psychologist. Personally, we needed one for our family and recommendations came flying our way hand over fist. The middle school students will open talk about going to a counselor with their friends.

Everyone is weird. That’s the secret in Weirdo. Weaver and his friends band together to save the school. They discover that some of the kids who made fun of them have their own issues. The tropes of certain groups didn’t hold up and everyone is the hero to their own story, but this is Weaver’s story.

The graphic novel is broken up into chapters. Much like the periods of your life that have a starting and stopping point, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Your middle school awkwardness will change, evolve and disappear into something else. Weirdo is a great graphic novel in the sense that it doesn’t sugarcoat the pain, isolation and feelings of hopelessness that some kids in middle and high school will experience. It shows ages 11 and up that there might be confusion, but it’s not completely dire. There are moments of brevity even in those dark times that seem like they’ll last forever.

Ironically enough, the last line in Weirdo is the mantra that our family uses when explaining someone’s story, and it’s all about perspective. Who is the hero of your story? If it’s not you, then you need to re-frame it, because it is your story. Oh, and we’re all weird, it’s just that your parents have the capacity to be leagues weirder than you, so don’t test us.

Weirdo is by Tony Weaver, Jr., with illustrations by Jes & Cin Wibowo and is available on :01 First Second Books, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press.

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