Book Review: Brownstone by Samuel Teer & Mar Julia

Brownstone by Samuel Teer & Julia Teer. Hardcover, 320 pages. Published by Versify on June 11, 2024. Genre: Graphic Novel

Brownstone, written by Samuel Teer and illustrated by Mar Julia, is the kind of story that transports readers into the ambiance of summer and captures the unhurried warmth of the season.

At the center of this emotionally intelligent graphic novel is Almudena, a young teenager navigating one of the more daunting emotional landscapes a person her age can face: spending an entire summer with a father she is meeting for the first time. Before her mother departs for a dance tour across Europe, she drops Almudena off at her father, Xavier’s, brownstone, which he is actively renovating, doing the work himself, and his daughter joins him in the laborious activity.

The setting quietly mirrors both the father-daughter relationship and Almudena’s own coming-of-age. It is a beautifully chosen metaphor, deployed with restraint. Teer trusts his readers to feel it rather than announcing it. The pacing is exceptionally well-judged, with the emotional architecture unfolding naturally, without an engineered crisis that forces the father and daughter to melodramatically rupture and prematurely test their emerging bond. Instead, Teer allows the relationship to develop with the same slow, sometimes awkward, sometimes unexpectedly tender rhythms that such a relationship would actually have in life.

Xavier’s Guatemalan heritage is woven naturally into who he is, and Teer handles this cultural specificity with confidence and affection, never reducing it to backdrop or color detail, but making it constitutive of character. The neighborhood itself becomes a kind of character too. The brownstone, Xavier’s home, sits within a community of vivid, fully realized personalities, neighbors and local figures whom Almudena gradually comes to know over the course of the summer. These encounters give the book much of its warmth and gentle comedy, and they also serve a structural purpose. Each new relationship Almudena builds outside the brownstone seems to quietly unlock another degree of openness with Xavier.

But it is Mar Julia’s illustrations that elevate Brownstone into something genuinely special. They bring a visual sensibility to the book that is at once vibrant and precise, capable of flooding a page with the saturated heat of a city summer and then, in the very next panel, narrowing to the almost imperceptible shift in a character’s expression. The emotional range on display is remarkable. Julia understands that in a story like this, so much of what matters is unspoken, and the illustrations are doing crucial narrative work in the white space between dialogue.

Panel from Brownstone. Source: Mar Julia’s website( https://www.marjulia.com/brownstone-2024)

The color palette deserves specific praise. Julia uses color not merely decoratively but expressively; the warm terra cottas and golds of the neighborhood streetscapes feel genuinely inhabited, and there is a recurring interplay between the brownstone’s interior light and the world outside that carries real emotional weight.

It is worth pausing to appreciate what a book like this demands of its creators in terms of collaboration. The making of a graphic novel, particularly one whose emotional life depends so heavily on the conversation between text and image, requires a creative relationship of uncommon trust and sensitivity. Teer’s script must have established not only what happens and what is said, but the emotional temperature of each scene, the weight of each silence, the precise moment at which the visual storytelling must carry what language cannot. Julia, in turn, must have brought not only technical skill but a deep interpretive intelligence, reading between the lines of a script to understand what a scene is about beneath what it depicts. The seamlessness of the result speaks to how successfully that collaboration was realized. There are no moments in Brownstone where the art and the writing feel like separate endeavors politely sharing a page; they feel like a single continuous act of expression.

This is a book about the slow, uncertain work of becoming family and about a summer that changes two people in ways neither could have anticipated when it began. It is generous, perceptive, and beautifully made, and it will resonate with young readers who have ever felt like strangers in a situation that was supposed to feel like home. Samuel Teer and Mar Julia have made something worth returning to.