This was a good graphic novel about female friendship for tweens, but I felt like there were too many characters involved and it made it hard to connect with any one character deeply.

A fun book about friendship and fitting in. Perfect quick and easy read for students to get into and find relatable themes.

A collection of characters more than a story. I never felt like we spent enough time with any of them to really care about them. The flat, thin line art style also took some time to get used to.

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Bring me allllll the graphic novel sport books! Fans of Fence, Check, Please, and Slam! will feel at home here.

This book has too much going on. Some of the characters look samey so I had a hard time figuring out who was in the panels. Also, there are way too many characters getting page time. I saw one character for a handful of pages and the next time I saw the character, he was coming out as trans. I didn't feel like I knew the character well enough to see this intimate and emotional moment. Of course, I'm adult reading the book so maybe kids might see it differently. The plot meanders.

I love a good sports story. The camraderie, sportsmanship and overall underdog nature of most sports stories often makes for the best types of reads or movies (think Mighty Ducks or Moneyball). The Breakaways was a quirky example of this. I loved the diversity of characters and experiences within the graphic novel. I think this book is perfect for tween fans of Nimona, Raina Telgemeier, and Lumberjanes.

The Breakaways
by Cathy G Johnson
Colors by Kevin Czap
FirstSecond Books

Johnson’s previous work has consisted of insightful drama and she brings these skills to The Breakaways, her first book for younger readers, which focuses on a hapless middle school girls’ soccer team. It’s not about soccer so much as the members themselves. In many ways, the team is a conceit that brings different people together, and Johnson treats all of them — whether it’s the dork kid or the bad kid or the bully kid or the popular kid or the weird kid or whatever kid it would be in whatever school trope — with respect and compassion as she digs deeper than their surface tensions.

At the center of the story is Faith, the kind of awkward kid who often ends up being the focus in these things, but the world opens up when she befriends Sodacan and Marie, two so-called “trouble” kids who operate on the fringes of the team, spending more time loafing and sneering than practicing. This allows the other characters to cascade in and out and lets Johnson work her narrative way through several of their lives to reveal the emotional diversity in such confluences and the commonality in all types — the need to be liked and appreciated.

There are some queer threads that run through the story that Johnson handles with an honestly sweet innocence as many of these kids are just figuring themselves out and this is one aspect. It’s the sort of inclusion in fictional works that not only gives helpful and needed representation, but also holds offers helpful and necessary empathy as the world opens up.

By the end, the soccer team is revealed for what it is, but not before capitalizing on the natural “working together as a team” trope that comes with it. What working together actually ends up meaning, though, is entirely refreshing in Johnson’s hands, and brings everything together in such a sweet way. This is a superior book to buy for your favorite younger reader.

Gorgeous book with themes of acceptance, autonomy, and a testament to the joy of being the underdog. Highly recommended.

Overall, this is SO lovely. The tagline "Bad at soccer. Okay at friendship." really is perfect for this story. Johnson portrays middle school friendships in all their gritty reality, and it's wonderful to see a middle school graphic novel featuring kids with all sorts of body shapes and sizes, skin tones, and gender presentations!

A fun and warm exploration of friendship and what it means to be a teammate. As others have said, the vignettes lead to a bit of a disjointed storytelling format, but the diversity of the cast makes up for it in my opinion. I'd love to read more!

This book is super diverse and very ambitious. That is to say, it tries to do a whole lot with characters (not a whole lot with plot) in a very short amount of time. Because if this, it doesn't quite hit the mark perfectly because it just doesn't have the time. It's a bit disorganized (missing transitions) as well. The overall idea is really positive, heartwarming, and relatable.

This is a great choice for reluctant readers looking for books featuring friendship and diverse characters. I’ve come to expect warm, fuzzy feels from middle grade graphic novels, and The Breakaways definitely didn’t disappoint. This tale of the C Soccer Team – all the kids who aren’t very good – was so cute and heart-warming and so well illustrated, but I’ll admit I was missing the “story” aspect. What we get is a series of vignettes from Faith’s teammates, interspersed by Faith’s daydreams / comic drawing. On one hand, the characters were so wonderfully diverse, and the author used scene after scene to build friendships between these kids, who accept each others’ differences without question. On the other hand, however, the set up of the vignettes made it difficult to keep track of characters, to understand their off-page relationships with each other (for ex., I’m still not sure how close V and Faith were), and some lines were barely explored (ex., #12 who joined late and only appeared on a couple pages) or left incomplete (ex., Bulldog and Warthog’s fallout).

A solid middle grade graphic novel with diverse characters and an engaging premise. This ragtag bunch of middle school students are terrible at soccer, but they keep going out on the field to try. In the meantime all sorts of personal drama is playing out on and off the field. Fun to read and hopefully not the only book with these characters.

This graphic novel was about a 3rd string soccer team that never won a single game. All of the players were pretty much "encouraged" to play but none of them were really any good. The book was more about them learning about themselves and forming bonds. It was okay but it seemed to just tick off some boxes as opposed to really developing characters or any kind of plot.

Fifth-grader Faith is astonished when popular eighth grader Amanda asks her to join the soccer team. She is even more surprised to find out she will be on the 'C' team. Rather than playing with pretty, popular Amanda, she will be playing with people who have nicknames like Bulldog and Warthog. As the season rolls on, Faith realizes that the coach is, at best, apathetic and the players care even less. She starts to make friends with a wide variety of people. Their team may not be the best but they are going to be friends in the end.
There are a lot of big themes in this book especially in terms of how you make friends in later grades, accepting people for who they are, and sometimes letting go of the people who are no longer your friends.

Three stars
This book comes out March 5
ARC kindly provided by publisher and NetGalley

I wanted to love this one but I didn’t. Maybe it is realistic that there would be that many students on the team that were GLBTQ, but it seemed a little heavy handed. It seemed the author was trying to hard to tell about characters struggling with identity, and I felt the narrative suffered and the characters ended up being fairly flat.

I could not wait to read this book—I love realistic fiction graphics for kids, and I was really excited that this one has a sports focus—but I was extremely disappointed. The story was disjointed and underdeveloped, with too many characters’ backstories that are touched on but never followed through with. I didn’t understand Faith’s fantasy world tie-in at all. Maybe it was because there were just too many characters and too much going on, but I completely missed some plot points altogether (I didn’t realize that they killed the chicken, and I could not tell you who V is, even though she’s apparently so important to Faith). The ending felt too sudden and anticlimactic—everyone is suddenly best friends without as much as an apology after they’ve spent all year being mean to each other. I was waiting for Faith to stick up for one of the many characters who was being victimized, or at least to realize that her friends are jerks and stop hanging out with them, but she gets lost in her own story with all the side characters. The gender/sexual orientation stuff also came out of nowhere for me and felt forced, even preachy, rather than natural.

I’m giving this two stars instead of one because the artwork is good (some of the dialogue bubbles are arranged awkwardly, but that can be fixed in final edits). All of the characters’ facial expressions were great and carried the story. Overall, though, a choppy, underdeveloped story that left me either ambivalent or annoyed at all of the characters and plot points.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy. I enjoyed this graphic novel about middle schooler Faith joining the soccer team in an effort to make friends. The girls on the team all talked to each other realistically and made very different choices, sometimes good and sometimes bad, across the course of the book. They really did pull together when it counted, though, particularly for accepting members differences and deciding as a group to quit soccer (or move up to the B team!). I think the book would have been better with fewer characters, however, and a little more time spent fleshing them out. The story was strongest when it explored the interpersonal dynamics between the players, particularly pairs of best friends who may drift apart and back together. I appreciated the inclusion of several LGBTQIA+ characters/themes but these weren't given the space necessary to really develop characterization. I loved the idea of Faith's drawings and daydreams interspersed with her daily life, but I wished they had interacted more. Despite this, I really enjoyed this one overall. This is the first I've read by Cathy G. Johnson, and I'm definitely going to look out for more in the future.

The best part of this graphic novel was the coloring and designs related to the character's tone and mood. This would be a great mentor text to use when needing a visual example to teach these skills. However, I feel that the plot was all over the place, and needed more character development. I wanted to know more about the development of one specific friendship and the conflict within that, as opposed to the surface level development of many friendships.