Continental Drifter is Kathy MacLeod’s debut novel, a graphic memoir following 11-year-old Kathy as she searches for a sense of belonging within her family and herself through spending the summer in Maine.
The story starts by showcasing Kathy’s life in Bangkok, Thailand. Kathy, the child of a successful Thai businesswoman and a retired member of the American military, grows up in a gated international community and attends an international school. While her family members all love each other, they don’t act like the happy, smiley families on TV. Kathy feels out of place in her family and in Thailand — she doesn’t look like everyone else, she lives in a secluded area, and she doesn’t even speak Thai. Feeling different from everyone around her and not Thai enough, Kathy seeks comfort through her familial connection to America. She watches American sitcoms and daydreams of summer, the time when she finally gets to travel to Maine to visit her father’s side of the family and attend summer camp.
When summer rolls around, Kathy and her family fly across the globe to small-town Maine. After spending months idealizing the American camp experience, Kathy finds herself still feeling different from the people around her. She stands out from the white East Coast girls who have spent the past summers together. Facing microaggressions and stereotypes, Kathy spends the summer working hard to make friends and find a sense of belonging in this new environment. By the end of summer, Kathy finds her own place within the summer camp and her family in America, even if they don’t completely understand her.
Continental Drifter’s illustrations are a highlight. Fun, vibrant, youthful but still grown-up; they complement Kathy’s emotions well throughout the memoir. MacLeod is also able to capture the feelings of loneliness and desire for belonging in a nuanced way that most readers will find relatable. Holding space for both the love that Kathy has for her family and the longing for them to truly understand her, the memoir is able to balance the complicated feelings that come with loneliness. The anxieties and hopes of being accepted by the people you admire — like girls at camp or your family — come across powerfully.
While Kathy’s emotions and desires are relatable, the memoir does not satisfyingly explore her identity within Thailand. While she expresses feelings of exclusion from both her Thai and American communities, the book solely focuses on finding a sense of belonging within whiteness. There is little discussion or exploration of finding community, acceptance, or understanding within Thailand, nor the privileges she seemingly holds there. In the memoir, Thailand is implicitly suggested to be the problem — a place where she faces rejection and loneliness — while America is suggested to be the solution — a place where Kathy finds acceptance, despite the racism she faces. This tacitly prioritizes her American identity over her Thai one. While this may be Macloed’s personal experience, young readers (especially mixed-race ones) may benefit from a more balanced and nuanced depiction of multiracial identity and searches for community.
Continental Drifter is a warm, emotional, and beautifully illustrated graphic memoir following a young girl’s hunt for belonging and understanding within herself, her family, and her world. Following Kathy from Bangkok to small-town Maine, she searches for and finds acceptance through navigating complicated relationships with her peers and her family. While Kathy’s emotions come through in a strong and moving way, MacLeod’s implicit thesis of acceptance and belonging through connection with only her American roots felt distracting and somewhat troublesome.
