Exclusive: ‘Just Roll With It’ Preview
Screen Rant is pleased to share an exclusive preview and quotes from the creative team of Just Roll With It, a new middle reader graphic novel.
You Are Reading :Exclusive Just Roll With It Preview
Screen Rant is excited to share an exclusive preview for the upcoming, original graphic novel, Just Roll With It. This new middle grade story is perfect for fans of Guts and Real Friends. Dice lovers everywhere will find a kindred spirit in Maggie, the lead heroine.
Just Roll With It is an original graphic novel from Random House Graphic. It is written by Lee Durfey-Lavoie with art by Veronica Agarwal. This middle grade graphic novel explores the “complexity of anxiety, OCD, and learning to trust yourself and the world around you.” This is Durfey-Lavoie’s debut graphic novel and the second from Agarwal, who previously illustrated Alexis vs. Summer Vacation (2019). Agarwal also created the webcomic, Magical Girl Problems, Magical Girl Solutions.
This graphic novel follows a young girl who is just starting middle school. She is having a tough time figuring out this stage of her life, but she has a way to approach her problems. When nervous, she pulls out a twenty-sided die and gives it a roll. However, how many decisions can she make before she ends up rolling the wrong number? Just Roll With It captures the struggles to fit in and the difficulty that can come with making decisions – even if the problem doesn’t seem very large on the surface. Check out the exclusive preview for the Random House Graphic novel here:
This graphic novel aims to open a dialogue about mental health for young readers and provide terminology that will help them navigate talking about it. Agarwal, the graphic novel’s illustrator, drew inspiration from Svetlana Chmakova’s Berry Brook Middle School series. She wants the story to show “how a lot of us live alongside our anxiety, and that the end goal of one’s mental health journey doesn’t have to be ‘fixing’ yourself, but rather becoming the best version of you, anxiety and all.”
Goals like this have been an important part of graphic novels aimed towards middle grade readers and young adults. Youth can be a difficult stage of life to navigate through, especially when trying to figure out who they are while still actively changing both mentally and physically. Just Roll With It adds to that ongoing conversation of shared experience.
Just Roll With It writer, Lee Durfey-Lavoie, shared the following with Screen Rant:
JUST ROLL WITH IT is a middle grade graphic novel about a young girl, Maggie, who is starting middle school. The normal middle school fears are compounded by bullies, high expectations from her mom, and a mysterious creature lurking outside the school, as well as her OCD. To cope with it all Maggie uses her trusty d20 to make hard choices to try and take the stress and fear of decision-making off her shoulders. Veronica Agarwarl (my co-author, illustrator, and partner) had the original idea in around 2016 and now here it is at 300+ pages. To be able to work with someone you’re so close with, when editing is just as fun and easy as brainstorming, is a dream come true. There’s nobody I’d rather have been on this journey with than her.
Veronica Agarwal, expanded on the themes presented within the graphic novel, stating:
I’ve been a pretty anxious person all my life, and I was diagnosed with OCD right around the time we started creating JUST ROLL WITH IT. My original impression of OCD had been focused on germ avoidance, counting, organizing, etc, so I wanted this book to be an introduction into symptoms which are perhaps not the ‘public face’ or ‘stereotype’ of OCD but are still huge parts of it. I never would’ve considered OCD was something I was suffering with until I heard other people talk about their specific experiences with it, and I realized it gets much deeper than what a surface level understanding would lead you to believe.
Just Roll With It from Random House Graphic releases December 14.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/just-roll-with-it-middle-grade-graphic-novel/