Blue is the warmest color / Julie Maroh.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A New York Times bestseller

The live-action French film version of Blue is the Warmest Color won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013.

Originally published in French as Le bleu est une couleur chaude , Blue is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel about growing up, falling in love, and coming out. Clementine is a junior in high school who seems average enough: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school. When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Their attraction is instant and electric, and Clementine find herself in a relationship that will test her friends, parents, and her own ideas about herself and her identity.

Vividly illustrated and beautifully told, Blue Is the Warmest Color is a brilliant, bittersweet, full-color graphic novel about the elusive, reckless magic of love. It is a lesbian love story that crackles with the energy of youth, rebellion, and desire.

First published in French by Glenat, the book has won several awards, including the Audience Prize at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, Europe's largest.

The live-action, French-language film version of Blue Is the Warmest Color won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2013. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, the film generated wide praise as well as controversy for its explicit scenes. It opened in the fall of 2013 through Sundance Selects/IFC Films (USA) and Mongrel Media (Canada) as well as other countries around the world, including the UK and Ireland (Artificial Eye) and Australia (Transmission Films). It was named best foreign-language film by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

French creator Maroh's Audience Award-winning graphic novel is a sincere love story told through the journal entries of Clementine, spanning her years in high school to adulthood. Despite Clementine's unhappy attempts at having a "normal" relationship with a boy, there is love at first sight when she sees the confident blue-haired Emma. Eventually, they meet and begin a relationship characterized by deep love but haunted by Clementine's difficulty in accepting herself and the depression brought on by her parents' and classmates' homophobia. Maroh's use of color is deliberate enough to be eye-catching in a world of grey tones, with Emma's bright blue hair capturing Clementine's imagination, but is used sparingly enough that it supports and blends naturally with the story. Verdict Even though the setting is dated, Paris in the mid-1990s, and the fight for LGBT rights is just beginning to gain public awareness, the electric emotions of falling in love and the difficult process of self-acceptance will resonate with all readers. Some nudity and brief sex scenes are depicted. The French film version of the graphic novel won the 2013 Palme d'Or, the highest honor awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, which may draw general interest.-Marlan Brinkley, Atlanta-Fulton P.L. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Love is a beautiful punishment in Maroh's paean to confusion, passion, and discovery. Clementine, a high school student, is in the midst of an identity crisis when she locks eyes with older, blue-haired Emma on the street. That moment keeps bubbling up in Clementine's dreams, drawing her toward a romantic truth that neither she, her family, nor her friends can or want to understand. Maroh's moody, exaggerated drawings and cool-hued colors give everything a dreamlike patina. Adolescent identity-seeking plays out against a mixture of heart-thumping decisions and brief but steam-heated romantic interludes. Maroh twists this potentially diagrammatic love story into a more operatic affair by telling it all in flashback, as Emma reads Clementine's diaries under the glowering eyes of her beloved's parents, who blame Emma for their daughter's death. Translated from the French, Maroh's graphic novel has already been adapted into a film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Controversy over the film's explicit love scenes (criticized by some, including Maroh herself, for being too voyeuristic and unromantic) will likely result in a lot of interest in this elegantly impassioned love story. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

From Belgium, the graphic novel on which the 2013 Palme d'Orwinning film of the same name was based. Clementine is 15 in 1994 when she sees a beautiful young woman with blue hair crossing the plaza. That night, the woman figures in an erotic dream, and her world is rocked. "I had no right to have thoughts like that." When she meets blue-haired Emma for real, she begins an at-first platonic relationship with the art student, who tells Clementine of her own coming out. The relationship turns sexual (graphically, beautifully so) and complicated. The story is told in flashback; readers meet a years-older Emma in the aftermath of Clementine's funeral as she reads Clementine's teenage diaries. The late-2000s scenes are somber and washed with blues, while the bulk of the tale is drawn in delicate black, gray and white with strategic highlights of blue. The text is occasionally clunky and purposive"We do not choose the one we fall in love with, and our perception of happiness is our own and is determined by what we experience"but the illustrations are infused with genuine, raw feeling. Wide-eyed Clementine wears every emotion on her sleeve, and even if today's teens will feel that her mid-'90s experience is rather antique, they will understand her journey perfectly. Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story. (Graphic historical fiction. 16 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.