Book #199 of 2025:
We Could Be Magic by Marissa Meyer and Joelle Murray
I don’t read a ton of graphic novels, but this one came so highly recommended that I wanted to make a point to check it out. And it is super cute — less so for the romance, which is fine but not as major an element as the publisher’s blurb would suggest, and more for the real love story here, between the heroine and the Disney-style theme park where she works as a summer intern. Or perhaps “love/hate” would be more accurate, as author Marissa Meyer excels at conveying the uneasy push and pull that fans of such establishments know all too well. On the one hand, those kinds of vacation spots are magical destinations that bring dreams to life and have many true believers on staff who live to make the guest experience spectacular. But they’re also unavoidably cutthroat corporate ventures with strict rules and conformist expectations behind the scenes, which is a tension that customers and employees alike must learn to navigate.
In this case, the protagonist longs to serve as a face character at Sommerland, rather than a food vendor or a masked mascot role. The problem is that she’s a shorter and plus-sized girl, and although no one wants to come out and say it, none of the princesses look like her. (She’s also dark-skinned, but that’s one area where the fictional version outpaces its real-world counterpart, as the royalty lineup seems pretty diverse and there’s no indication that racism is a factor anywhere in the book.) She gets given worse assignments because of her weight, while coworkers who clearly don’t care as much about the intended mission of the job squander their ignorant privilege. It’s realistically disheartening and exploitative, despite building to a triumphantly implausible feel-good conclusion in the end.
I’m of two minds about the Disney angle. The parallel to the off-brand corollary is so exact as to be distracting — the park even has “hidden kitties” everywhere to find — and it’s obvious that the writer and her artist Joelle Murray are purposefully engaging with that established iconography, instead of aiming to tell a story about a wholly original type of circumstance. So wouldn’t this be a stronger work if it dispensed with the pretense and simply featured the House of Mouse directly? On the other hand, fictionalizing it does license a few key departures, in addition to the plausible deniability that keeps Walt’s lawyers at bay. Ultimately I suppose the overall piece is breezy enough to set such concerns aside, and just enjoy the atmospheric tale of a young person standing up for herself and the idea that she deserves representation like anybody else.
★★★★☆
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