The Plain Janes (MINX) by Cecil CastellucciThe Plain Janes by Cecil Castel­lucci and Jim Rugg is the  first release from the Minx Imprint pub­lished this year. Sim­i­lar to the other Minx titles, it fea­tures a strong female pro­tag­o­nist in yet another well writ­ten com­ing of age story for teens. Here is the back blurb:

Noted young adult nov­el­ist Cecil Castel­lucci and artist Jim Rugg launch MINX with THE PLAIN JANES, a story about four girls named Jane who sit at the reject table at lunch.

When trans­fer stu­dent Jane is forced to move from the con­fines of Metro City to Sub­ur­bia, she thinks her life is over. But there in the lunch room at the reject table she finds her tribe: three other girls named Jane. Main Jane encour­ages them to form a secret art gang and paint the town P.L.A.I.N. — Peo­ple Lov­ing Art In Neigh­bor­hoods. But can art attacks really save the hell that is high school?

The story opens with Jane’s fam­ily mov­ing from the city to the sub­urbs. A brush with dis­as­ter has resulted in her fam­ily being afraid of the city. Jane tries not to embrace her par­ents fear of the world by try­ing to sur­vive and live her life with­out being fear­ful of every­one and every­thing around her. Her inner strength comes from her daily cor­re­spon­dence with a John Doe who is hos­pi­tal­ized and in a coma. He was also a vic­tim of the same tragedy that forced her fam­ily to move.

Dur­ing lunch, at Jane’s new high school, she bypasses the cool group of kids to befriend three other girls at the reject table.  All have the same name of Jane.  At first they reject Jane’s friend­ship but even­tu­ally she wins them over. Jane loves art and is inspired to cre­ate a secret club called P.L.A.I.N which stands for Peo­ple Lov­ing Art In Neigh­bor­hoods and invites her new friends to join. Their art projects draws imme­di­ate atten­tion and causes many stu­dents to rebel. The uproar by soci­ety draws police atten­tion to the group, too. PLAIN becomes pop­u­lar with the high school kids that even the coolest kids in school want to be apart of PLAIN.  It’s only fit­ting that the story ends with a bit of sus­pense as PLAIN pulls off the biggest caper of all.

I really, really enjoyed this title.  How­ever, I do think the cover is some­what mis­lead­ing. The story has such a seri­ous tone at the start with Jane’s fam­ily hav­ing to deal with a tragic event and are forced to change their view of the world. How­ever, it’s Jane’s deter­mi­na­tion not to share their view: to feel unsafe in her own envi­ron­ment. She strug­gles not to panic when con­fronted with her past. She embraces life and change. Inside, she just wants to be dif­fer­ent. Plain. Of course she has her moments of doubt and weak­ness but she tries to over­come them. I really enjoyed this story and wanted to know more. There were a cou­ple of threads that were not resolved so I’m hop­ing that we’ll see the four Jane’s again soon. Lik­able char­ac­ters, decent artwork, interesting story with a bit of romance, I’d grade this one a B+.

I’d never heard of Cecil Castel­lucci but after much research I see that she is a pop­u­lar YA nov­el­ist and this is her first graphic novel. I’ll have to search out her debut novel, “Boy Proof” which made the ALA Best Book For Young Adults list because I was really impressed with her work here. Her newest release is titled, Beige which shows to be in hard­cover. Read­ing over the back blurbs they sound really interesting.