Half graphic novel and half prose-poem journal, Pardalita is a sweet, gentle coming-of-age story for YA readers. At the start of the book, 16-year-old protagonist Raquel has been suspended from school for two days for cursing at the hall monitor, a suspension that doesn’t much bother her, as she has the home to herself.

Raquel hangs out with her two best friends Luísa and Fred, lives with her divorced mom, and spends every other weekend with her dad. Uncertain of herself and unsure of her direction in life, Raquel is painfully shy—”when I started elementary school I spoke so softly that no one heard me”—unlike her force-of-nature mother, who constantly urges her “to shed my shyness like an overcoat.” Raquel describes her mother as:

like a bulldozer, rolling up everything in her way. No one can stop her. I bet in elementary school she was the first one to raise her hand. The first one to climb the wall and fall off and have to get stitches. The first one to kiss a boy.

Raquel finds herself fascinated by a dynamic, artistic senior named Pardalita, an attraction that develops into a crush when Fred twists Raquel’s arm into joining the theater group that Pardalita runs. Caught off guard when asked to audition, Raquel winds up working on sound, which is a much better fit. She starts hiding and ignoring texts from her boyfriend Miguel, who eventually takes the hint and breaks up with her.

Pardalita moves back and forth between Raquel’s recollections of her childhood to her present time in high school, as she puzzles over her unamed feelings for Pardalita and her own sexual identity. Drifting through her life with a dreamy wistfulness, she reads about Sappho and, over time, realizes that she’s attracted to a girl.

The book’s protagonist gives authentic voice to the churning, sweet yearning and slightly foggy confusion that is so typical of adolescence—and of early adolescent love. Black-and-white line drawings drive the story, with wordless or lightly texted panels sometimes moving the plot forward. Indeed, the denouement is shown entirely in a sequence of roughly a dozen evocatively wordless pages.

While readers don’t get to watch their romance develop beyond its earliest stage, we don’t have to. A beautiful final image of Pardalita and Raquel leaning into each other is enough.

Pardalita
Written and illustrated by Joana Estrela
Translated from the Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
ISBN: 9781646142569
2023, Levine Querido

Reviews: Publishers Weekly Starred Review; Kirkus

You can buy a copy here* or find it at a library.

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Award-winning opera singer Nanette McGuinness is the translator of over 100 books and graphic novels for children and adults from French, Italian, German and Spanish into English, including the much-loved Geronimo Stilton Graphic Novels, as well as Tiki: A Very Ruff Year (nominated for the 2023 Eisner and Harvey Awards) and Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War (2023 GLLI YA Translated Book Prize Honor Book, 2023 Mosaic Prize winner, 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalist and 2023 Harvey Award nominee). Accolades have also gone to her translations of Magical History Tour: Vikings and of Magical History Tour: Gandhi (both 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalists), Luisa: Now and Then (2019 Stonewall Honor Book; 2020 GLLI YA Translated Honor Book; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2019) and California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas (2018 Harvey Award; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2018).