Review by Ian Keogh

At eleven Avery Lee is the second oldest of seven children, meaning there’s not much space or privacy in the family home. She likes drawing, her home town of Hickory Valley, and she likes her friends, but what creators Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter show exceptionally well is the pressure of living in a house with so many siblings. She already shares a room with Pearl, prone to playing musical instruments any time of the day, and her parents have now decided that infant Max should share their room also.

Avery’s life is arranged into brief chapters of around a dozen pages at a time, each identifying a new problem, but each also offering a solution, as Lloyd subtly underlines how things change as kids get older, and Avery’s about the age when they come to realise that. However, the fundamental problem is slightly undermined by Nutter drawing Avery’s house with very large rooms, so readers may wonder why it doesn’t occur that a partition could be the answer to solitude. With the cast Nutter is more intuitive, showing how Avery feels, even when she’s not saying something out loud. She’s overwhelmed in a new friend’s house, and we learn she’s one for wearing her heart on her sleeve.

Halfway through the big bombshell drops. By then we’ve seen Avery at home, around the neighbourhood, and in school, and while life’s not ideal, most of the time it’s pretty good. There are the niggles between people that all families have, but Avery’s parents are considerate and caring, and when it comes right down to it the brothers and sisters will back each other up. Reading about them prompts the realisation that so few graphic novels for young adults concern a family complete and content. Except how’s it going to be if the family move from Maryland to Oregon?

It isn’t all domestic bliss and harmony, though, and near the end Lloyd throws in a crisis that seems uncharacteristically tense, although it’s rapidly solved and has been foreshadowed. Ultimately Squished passes on the message that sometimes life throws curveballs, but as long as a family sticks together and supports each other, everything should be okay in the end. Of course, life isn’t going to be like that for every reader, but who’s to say they’re not going to enjoy some solace with Avery and every last Lee.