Review by Ian Keogh

Tripping Over You concerns the outwardly cool and confident Milo and the reserved Liam. Their relationship began during Milo’s final year at school, and he’s now doing a drama course at university while his stepfather’s connections are responsible for his getting a stagehand job.

Owena White’s solid, character-rich cartooning makes this continuation look exactly like the very enjoyable Book One, but this is a different proposition. Liam and Milo – note how one name is almost the anagram of the other – have moved forward, and have crucially left most of the supporting cast behind. Their absence is sorely missed, as is their comedy relief. Instead we have too many scenes of Milo and Liam never quite communicating adequately, their minds elsewhere, and Liam’s awkwardness around his father. Suzana Harcum invests each individual scene with a breezy naturalism, but they devolve in repetition over the book’s first third, which probably wouldn’t have been apparent when Tripping Over You was serialised online.

Harcum’s characterisation remains strong. Milo and Liam have believable personalities, individual charm and their concerns are easily understood. She brings matters to a potential crisis point with Liam and Milo being away during a snow storm that’s stronger than predicted, but it’s wasted opportunity as conversations are never had and we’re rapidly back to the status quo.

It’s halfway through before Book Two progresses beyond a collection of brief charming sequences, the arrival point beautifully timed for a crisis occurring when Liam finally decides to confide in his father. It’s the beating heart of the book, Harcum stretching beyond the glib conversations she can write so well to someone having their world turned upside down. It underlines how the primary characters work best when there’s the variety of them bouncing off others, a later scene in a supermarket doing the same.

Anyone utterly absorbed in Liam and Milo, which isn’t that difficult to conceive, will enjoy the good-natured progress of them growing up and moving on. Anyone wanting less reliance on day to day drama and more reliance on comedy or plot won’t be as satisfied as they were with Book One, which had greater substance.