This week in Bwog’s Book Club, Staff Writer Elle reviews Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth! Bwog’s Book Club was started this January with the intention of spreading the literary love around campus and encourage you to pick up a book, as opposed to your iPhone, in your spare time. If you have a piece of literature, be it novel, essay, or anything non-fiction, that you want to share with the student population, please feel free to email us: tips@bwog.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire is one of the greatest graphic series of this decade and y’all can fight me on it. I know comics are usually thought of as a ~childish~ and ~nerdy~ genre, and as a child and a nerd, I’m frankly insulted by this reductive stigma. Comic stories are thrilling, vivid, and should be appreciated as their own literary genre. Sweet Tooth hits the thrills, the feels, and more.

Jeff Lemire sets his story in future America when the country is in ruins because of a plague that all but wiped out the population years before. Stay with me, this isn’t going to be a cliché dystopian story. As a result of the plague, a generation of hybrid human-animals are born. The main character, Gus, is a deer-boy hybrid who lives in the woods with his dad who’s a crazy religious fanatic. Shortly after the book begins Gus’s father dies and Gus breaks his father’s only rule: he leaves the camp. He’s then rescued by a man named Jepperd who promises to take him somewhere safe and then the two of them go on a really epic adventure together. I don’t want to spoil any more because you should read it, but there are plot twists and amazing characters with even better backstories. Get this one off the shelves!

Sweet Tooth Cover via Wikimedia