July Underwater
2015/2022
Conundrum Press
96 pages, 20 in colour
$20
"As dusk falls over the lake, Lina’s world is beginning to dissolve.
It’s a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina's spending her first couple of weeks after graduation reading and hanging out with her best friend Cara. Everything’s calm—until she learns that her childhood friend Alicia has died.
With her high school friends quickly drifting apart and her parents out of town, Lina tries to make sense of what has happened on her own. Hoping for answers, she turns to the books she's been immersing herself in. As Lina reunites with her friends for a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, she finds herself wondering what it means to have known someone, and who they'll all become when they're no longer anchored to each other."
This book was originally made possible with funding from the Concordia Fine Arts Reading Room
Advance Praise
& Reviews
Winner of the 2016 Expozine Award
for Best English Language Comic
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"July Underwater is a mystical journey through time, memory and grief. Done in exquisite wash, line and letter, Zoe Maeve is a talent to be taken seriously."
-Mannie Murphy, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
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"July Underwater is about big universal themes - transitions, friendship, death, romance, incomplete childhood memories, and trying to know the unknowable. Instead of feeling like a collage, the parts merged like different rooms within a house, each relating completely to the whole. I love this little, beautiful book, which magically feels saturated and spacious at the same time."
-Keiler Roberts, My Begging Chart, The Joy of Quitting
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"A freeform graphic novel, telling a complex story in relatively few pages, some words, and glorious pictures, the book references Shakespeare, nineteenth-century art, and works from two important twentieth-century writers. [...] The result is cinematic and impressionistic. [...] There are blooms and brushstrokes, along with slightly transparent whites over blacks, plenty of water and plant imagery, even lucid diagrams that plot out a character’s train of thought. [...] It doesn’t hammer its points home, but rather touches on them lightly and allows us to come to our own conclusions."
-Montreal Review of Books
