Book Review: Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

August 2, 2024

I apparently am really going through a phase that I am drawn to all of these graphic novel memoirs. I didn’t realize this book was a memoir until I picked it up from the library.

We follow the story of a young, Russian, girl named Vera. We meet her just before she turned 9 years old and she is having a hard time fitting in with the group of girls that are supposed to be her friend group. Every summer, the girls in her “friend group” would all go to camp, and talk about it all school year long, and Vera felt wildly left out. She is growing up in the suburbs in upstate New York and is significantly more poor than the people around her, and her parents aren’t together, like the parents of most of the kids in her grade are. So she just feels like she has the perfect mixture of unpopular things. Very begs and begs her mother to allow her to go to summer camp, but there isn’t a way that her mom can afford it, until she is at church and one of her peers tells her about this Russian camp that the church sponsors kids to go to every year. Vera is ecstatic and her mother works it out so that she can go to this camp, but she had to bring her brother with her. Little did she know, this was not going to be the summer camp experience she was expecting.

I love this kind of book for so many reasons. 1. I love seeing life from another real person’s point of view - good, bad or ugly. I love that I am able to hear her voice in this book and understand the heartaches and the excitements of being 8 in her life. 2. It is an insight into a culture that I otherwise may have never been exposed to. She mentions parts of her life that I wouldn’t have thought much about, but are different for her based on the way that she was raised. 3. It is so playful and fun. Overall I would highly recommend this book and look forward to many graphic memoirs in the future.