
On Monday morning, Emmie wakes up and goes to school. In the first comic book section, Katie introduces herself as a beautiful, athletic, popular girl with a picture-perfect life. Emmie spends a lot of time alone, and in this time she discovers that she loves to draw. She is 13 years old and she lives with her two distant parents who are revamping their careers now that Emmie’s siblings have all moved out and gone on to college. But Emmie is a main character who is simply quiet and unremarkable, neither bullied or popular, but simply invisible.Īs the novel starts in earnest, Emmie introduces herself. In the prelogue, Emmie talks about all the YA books that she has read, and said that most of them feature a main character who is an outcast for a specific reason and is bullied because of that reason. The novel begins with a “prelogue” in which Emmie tells us that she has turned into a puddle of slime, and that she will explain how this happened and why.

All of the action is told in colorful panels that feature captions, thought-bubbles, and dialogue-bubbles. Katie’s sections resemble a traditional comic book. Emmie’s sections resemble a traditional novel with lots of white space and black words, interspersed with small sketches that add to the narrative. The novel seems to rotate its point of view between quiet and timid Emmie and the perfect and beautiful Katie, but in the end we learn that Katie is a fictional cartoon character created by Emmie, who draws comics in her notebook in order to help her deal with the pressures and stresses of being a girl in middle school. Invisible Emmie is a graphic novel that is told in the first person by the main character, Emmie.

The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Libenson, Terri.
