Unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life, Whitakers debut cuts straight to the heart of the creative process.From the minute Sharon Kisses meets Mel Vaught, the women are inseparable. Both are visual art majors with obvious talent. Both are from the rural south (Sharon: East Kentucky, Mel: Central Florida), united by their shared white trashiness (Mels words)a rarity at their posh East Coast liberal arts college. And both have a passion, an unquenchable thirst, for comics. Im gonna be a cartoonist, Mel says, the first night they hang out. Animate. What else is there? By graduation, they are not just best friends, but also artistic partners. Ten years later, theyre living and working together, still in a piece-of-crap studio in Brooklyn. They make small, thoughtful cartoons and out-of-mainstream animation shorts for a thinking womans audience, according to critics. Their first full-length feature, an autobiographical project based on Mels childhood, wins them an ultraprestigious grant. They are a perfectly mismatched pair: Sharon is curvy, consistent, and perpetually lovelorn; Mel is thin and gay, the life of the party. But transforming their private pasts into public art comes at a cost, and as the novel progresses and both women are struck by different kinds of tragedies, Sharon and Mel are forced to come to terms with their families, themselves, and the painful limitations of their bond. Sweeping and intimate at once, the novel is an exquisite portrait of a life-defining partnership. Whitaker captures the shifting dynamics between Mel and Sharonbetween all the characters, reallywith such precision and sharpness that its hard to let them go.Empathetic but never sentimental; a book that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught meet in an art class in college and are immediately drawn into a lifelong friendship. Both come from troubled homes and are warm and loving people hiding inside themselves. Mel is a hard-drinking, -talking, -living lesbian who appears to be absolutely fearless. Sharon is the straight, detail-oriented, introverted counterweight to Mel. For ten years, they have been getting by working on small projects-short cartoons and advertisements. When they put Mel's life onto a cartoon storyboard, create a full-length animated film, and win a Hollingsworth grant, their future seems secure. Then Sharon has a stroke at age 31. This event and Sharon's recovery give them fodder for a second film about Sharon's life. In this fine first novel, Whitaker captures the human frailties that beset everyone-jealousy, anger, insecurity, trauma, the search for love-and weaves them into a compelling story of friendship, self-destruction, and salvation. VERDICT Highly recommended for fiction readers, the LBGTQ community, those with an interest in cartooning, and anyone interested in the variability of the human condition.-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"FOR BETTER OR WORSE." This is how Sharon Kisses, the marvelously named narrator of Kayla Rae Whitaker's unusual and appealing debut novel, "The Animators," describes her intense and often fraught relationship with Mel Vaught, the other half of the animation filmmaking team referred to in the book's title. It is an apt description. There's been no shortage in recent years of narratives exploring the complicated and often intense friendships that develop between women. But in "The Animators," Whitaker has given us something we rarely see: a relationship between two women that also revolves around business and art. It's a connection that in many ways resembles a marriage - a shared life, passion and progeny (in this case their artwork), with all the requisite compromises and envy that go along with coupledom - despite the two never being romantically involved. The women first encounter each other as fellow art students at a privileged liberal arts college in upstate New York. Sharon is there on what she calls the "Poor Appalachian Kid scholarship"; Mel, the blazing class talent with the rock-star personality (and self-destructive tastes to go with it), has emerged from a precarious "full-on trash" Florida upbringing. After one night of watching cartoons they agree to work together, and their soon-to-be legendary partnership is born. The novel then leaps ahead a decade and finds the pair sharing a live/work studio space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their first feature-length animated film, based on Mel's troubled life, has garnered them a cult following and a prestigious grant for their next project. Mel's lifestyle, however, forces Sharon - who often operates in the shadow of Mel's oversize presence - to keep the business running while Mel runs wild on drink, drugs and women. When Sharon suffers a debilitating medical setback, the tables of their relationship are turned, forcing Mel into the position of caretaker and Sharon into the spotlight. At the behest of Mel, who wants to use Sharon's recovery as the basis for their next feature, they delve deep into Sharon's past by way of the List: a "secret compendium of every man with whom I have ever fallen in love," in which drawings of "unseemly things appear." Using the List as their guide, the women set out on the road first to visit Sharon's family in Kentucky, and then to track down a boy she knew as a child, who holds the key to the traumatic memories that are haunting her. "The Animators" covers familiar debut-novel territory: the search for identity, the desire for success, the bewildering experiences of small-town misfits leaving home for the bright lights of New York City. But Whitaker turns these motifs on their heads simply by changing the direction of the road and populating it with women. New York success is left behind in favor of rural America - "where a man will hit a woman in public just as easily as he'll open the door for her" - a place sketched out with convincing ease by Whitaker, a Kentucky native. Sharon, who begins as an updated version of Sal Paradise or Nick Carraway, manages to draw herself (literally) into the starring role of her life and work, instead of simply chronicling the lives of those around her. Throughout, Whitaker repeatedly questions whether it's possible to tell one's story without robbing another person of theirs. "It makes you both thieves," Sharon's boyfriend insists upon discovering his life is the subject of her new film. She disagrees. "That story in there is mine. It belongs to me," she counters. "This is what I do and you know it. We don't need your consent." Maybe not, but as the characters in this novel repeatedly learn, the freedom to tell one's own story often comes at a steep price. If "The Animators" suffers from the debut novelist's curse of trying to do too much, Whitaker's obvious talent with dialogue and establishing a sense of place prevents it from feeling weighed down. Also, the intensity of the working relationship between these two flawed women keeps the momentum of the novel alive. GLYNNIS MACNICOL'S memoir, "Good Driving," will be published next year.

Updating the theme of how artists turn personal pain into art, Whitaker's outstanding debut novel portrays two women working together to create adult cartoons. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses meet in a college art class. Confident, talented, and openly gay, Mel anticipates a career in animation, while quiet, lonely, straight, and inexperienced Sharon knows only that she wants to be an artist. Mel introduces Sharon to works by R. Crumb and other alternative animators and comics artists before the two women collaborate on their own dark, funny, carefully crafted work, discovering they perfectly complement each other. A decade after graduation, they gain recognition for Nashville Combat, a full-length animated film based on Mel's early life in central Florida as the daughter of a delinquent mother who went to prison when Mel was 13. Mel and Sharon struggle following the film's success: a drunken Mel rips out the microphone during an NPR interview; they argue; Sharon suffers an aneurism. Renewal for the pair comes with a new project, this one focused on Sharon, who returns with Mel to her eastern Kentucky home to confront her own disturbing memories and reconnect with her one childhood friend. Whitaker deftly sketches settings and characters: Brooklyn is all chain-link fences and loading docks and aging signage, Mel is the fire-starter, Sharon the finisher. Whitaker skillfully charts the creative process, its lulls and sudden rushes of perfect inspiration. And in the relationship between Mel and Sharon, she has created something wonderful and exceptional: a rich, deep, and emotionally true connection that will certainly steal the hearts of readers. Agent: Bonnie Nadell, Hill Nadell Literary Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Creative partners since college, Sharon and Mel's friendship crumbles after the release of their first animated hit film, a disturbing reimagining of Mel's life. After Mel's mother dies in jail and Sharon suffers from a stroke, however, they relearn how to support each other and forge ahead, once again as best friends and artists. When they visit Sharon's rural hometown, Sharon shares dark secrets from her past the impetus for their next controversial movie. With the nonstop tension of a soap opera, Whitaker's debut traces all the big fights and revelations with care. Both women make thoughtless decisions, which readers will only sympathize with because Sharon's narrative voice is so visceral and because Mel is utterly compelling. A charismatic lesbian, she overindulges in everything: drinking, smoking, and, most of all, her passion for drawing stories most people are too afraid to tell. Serious artists will especially relate to Sharon and Mel's journey, but The Animators is recommended for anyone who enjoys unsettling dramas about people who can't escape themselves.--Hyzy, Biz Copyright 2016 Booklist