In his autobiographical account of young love and self-discovery -- Blankets -- Craig Thompson walks readers through his adolescent awakening. He centers the story around his time at a Christian summer camp as a teenager. While there, he meets and falls in love with a girl. He begins to question the values his parents raised him to uphold because the girl affirms him in ways that he never thought possible.
The book is Thompson's personal bildungsroman, a story of the loss of innocence and the dawning of experience. The point is that regardless of whether Craig had met Raina when he did or not he was about to start reframing his beliefs. Due to his adolescence and arbitrarily strict upbringing, Craig doubtless would have encountered the same moral dilemmas with or without Raina. Her significance is as a trigger rather than an individual. At the same time, Thompson writes about her with such a tenderness that one can easily identify the significance of her in his adult life.
Looking for a thoughtful coming of age story? This is the one. The writing is deliberate and reflects a serious amount of caution, as if the events about which he writes are preserved with religious severity in Thompson's mind. This book is his testimony of how he philosophically arrived on the map as a young man.
