The Animators

From age eighteen on, I had a partner, a kindred spirit. I had a friend. Someone bound and determined to keep me from the worst in myself. At a private East Coast college, two young women meet in art class. Sharon, ambitious but lacking confidence, arrives from rural Kentucky. Mel, brash and wildly gifted, brings her own brand of hellfire from the backwaters of Florida. Both outsiders, Sharon and Mel become fervent friends, bonding over their love of classic cartoons, their dysfunctional working-class families, and Ñ above all Ñ their craft: drawing. Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.

A decade later, Sharon and Mel are an award-winning animation duo, living and working in Brooklyn, and poised on the edge of even greater success after the release of their first full-length feature. But with this success comes self-doubt and cracks in their relationship start to form. When unexpected tragedy strikes, long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.

Funny and heartbreaking by turn, The Animators is a dazzling story of female friendship, the cost of a creative life, and the secrets that can undo us.

Review by Ilse Scheepers

Sharon and Mel meet in art school. They are both fleeing their white trash origins, they both love cartoons, they both aspire to tell their stories - gut-wrenching, searing stories - in their own voices. They form an intense bond, and after ten years, they become an award-winning animation duo.

Whitaker has written two women who burn across the page - Mel brightly like a magnesium flare, Sharon slowly like the white hot embers of a bonfire. Her exploration of their creative partnership is pitch perfect, and the best I've read. However, it's not without its tension.

Sharon resents babysitting the unbridled Mel, and Mel wants to shake Sharon out of her emotional deep-freeze. This conflict drives the duo to produce art that is so raw, so dark and full of terrible, deep knowledge, that I am glad I had the page between me and it to filter out some of the intensity.

To mention plot points would be to spoil the story, but suffice to say I burst out in ugly, wrenching sobs twice while reading this debut. Whitaker has perfectly captured that particular kind of female friendship that rewards and challenges, nourishes and frustrates. It leaves all those hackneyed, fictional cliched tropes in lesser fiction, where women are only competitors or frenemies, gibbering in the dust. And a good thing, too.