This deceptively charming story of preteen friends seeking refuge in the French countryside is a modern-day Lord of the Flies
Take two girls. Charlie, dark and scowling, is a scrappy preteen whose single mother has no idea how to deal with her extended absences from their shack-like home at the edge of a wood, while Astrid, fair-haired and timidly polite, inhabits a cosy middle-class world of family dinners and indulgent shopping trips (there is never a wrong time for a new dress). They are, in other words, total opposites, and at school Charlie affects hardly to know Astrid, keen to keep up appearances in front of the boys who bully them both. When the day is done, however, they’re clandestine friends, united by an uncommon unhappiness and the terrifying pact it has brought them to make.
Look back on adolescence, and it seems like a bad dream – or a serious illness. My own is at once vivid and hard to remember, its sludgy days (I thought they’d never end) punctuated by tepid Nescafé and wild dramas of my own making – which may be why Manon Debaye’s The Cliff left me feeling so peculiar. At first sight, her acclaimed graphic novel looks to be utterly delightful, its colour pencil sketches full of nostalgic picture book charm. Here are cute striped T-shirts, whispering silver birch trees, and an azure sea. But don’t be lulled! In truth, hers is a dark story. Think Lord of the Flies transposed to 21st-century France. It’s about what can all too easily happen to young people when adults turn away, distracted either by their own problems, or by the complacent conviction that no child of theirs has any right really to be unhappy.
