First Impression: Snapdragon

Eliza Smith

The first time I ever read Snapdragon by Kat Leyh was a whirlwind experience for me. I had purchased the book from an artist at Comic-Con because they were wearing a shirt with a black-and-white illustration of a small black bird holding a knife with a speech bubble above it proclaiming FIGHT ME, which I loved. Also, they had short hair and were female-presenting, so I felt a automatic kinship with them and I like supporting local artists. I was settling in to wait in an hour-long line for another artist who was more well-known to me then, but whose name I cannot remember now, when I cracked open Snapdragon without reading the back cover copy and not knowing anything about it. 

From page one, I was hooked. I blazed through the entire book in that one hour I was sitting in line, on the cold concrete floor, oblivious to everything but this story. By the time I reached the artist I was waiting for, Snapdragon had already become my favorite book.

Snapdragon is a graphic novel by local Chicago artist Kat Leyh, about a young Black high school student who doesn’t fit in. She wears jeans and sweatshirts, she’s tough and fiercely protective. The first time we see her is when she braves the stories about her town witch’s house to rescue her pit bull puppy, Good Boy, nicknamed GB or “Geebies.” When we first see him, he doesn’t have his front right leg. The atmosphere is suggesting that that the “witch” is responsible for GB’s missing leg, but we learn later she is the one who patched GB up after an accident and saved his life. We also learn that the witch who seemed intimidating at first is just Jacks, an old crocs-wearing outsider who doesn’t fit the stereotypes society places on people assigned female at birth. 

Snapdragon, our main protagonist, who often goes by Snap, doesn’t have a lot of friends at school because she’s ostracized by both the boys and girls at school for being weird. She doesn’t fit in with the boys, but she’s also not a girly girl. If there is one thing this book is about, it’s about contradictions—things that seem like they are one way, until you learn they are not what you expected, and that’s ok.

There’s no way for me to fully describe everything I love about Snapdragon without going over the entire plot, every character’s motivation, every artistic panel. But Snapdragon feels to me like therapy. It’s the book I feel I can whole-heartedly recommend to anyone at any age group because I believe it will without doubt have either something someone can to relate to or something for someone to learn.

I have a little bit of impostor syndrome because I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I feel supported by my partner and my friends, and inhabit a safe environment to be myself. I didn’t have an upbringing where I didn’t feel like I couldn’t be myself, and I’m grateful for that. But books like Snapdragon help me come to better understand parts of myself that were always there, I just didn’t have any context for them.

The first time I ever thought about gender was in elementary school when I was playing a game where I was running around with the other boys on the school playground “catching” girls (essentially like tag). Each time you “caught” one, you went up a military rank. Once I asked, “What about me? I’m a girl.” The boys said, “That doesn’t count,” like I was one them, not one of the girls playing house, which I found boring.

In middle school, my mom also was always telling me to care more about my appearance, to brush my hair, to be more neat. It wasn’t until high school that I did start trying to dress more femininely, modeling myself on my popular sister, growing my hair long and wearing mini skirts. But I always wore shorts underneath my skirts and dresses. I hung out with the techies (more guys than girls). I played action video games that were mainly “for guys.” All while presenting in a very feminine way, by choice.  I liked these contradictions. Without realizing it, I was finding a way to fit in, but doing it in a way that felt authentic to me.

In Snap’s book, she also finds ways she can be her authentic self, and likewise she becomes that safe space for two other characters she develops bonds with. One of the things I love best about Snapdragon is that it demonstrates loving and safe bonds of all kinds without the book being about that. For example, one of Snap’s first friends is Louis, a young Black boy who is one of the only ones not to bully Snap at school. Louis, like Snap, lives in a trailer park, and has 2 older brothers who tease him for not being enough of a guy. Snap and Louis bond over this shared feeling of otherness, and at one point, Snap and Louis trade a twirly skirt for a shirt with dragons on it. The amount of sheer joy Snap gets when she puts on the dragon shirt and seeing how happy it makes Louis to twirl around in a flowing skirt is one of my absolute favorite parts of the book. Throughout the book, as Louis and Snap’s friendship and trust develop, we start seeing Louis experimenting with this more and more: growing longer hair, starting to wear earrings, starting to put on makeup. It’s present in the art but not the focus of the story. This really feels like an important distinction to me because it normalizes the things it demonstrates. It made me feel like it could be normal to experiment with parts of myself in this way without outright stating, “I am X now.” Later in the book, we see Louis at a family gathering with long hair, female-presenting, and one of her brothers from earlier in the story calls her “Lu” like it’s no big deal. 

I lived in CT my whole life until I moved to Illinois for a job, and the first thing I did was cut my long hair, something I always wanted to do but my mom always advised me not to. “You’ll look like a boy.” What, I thought, was so wrong with that? I’m still me.

Now as an adult, there are times when I want to be feminine and there are times when I want be more stereotypically masculine. I love clothes because they help me express however I’m feeling that particular day. (I personally think we should do away with gendered clothing and just have “clothing.”) I do own a number of pieces of clothing stereotypical for men though I am female-identifying and in a committed hetero relationship; sometimes it feels right to me to be more masculine-presenting. I am still me. 

I am lucky enough to have found a partner and a tight group of friends who enabled me to unfurl the nonbinary leaves inside and explore these different parts of myself without having to call attention to it or needing to announce it. And it’s books like Snapdragon that let me believe those leaves were inside me in the first place.