Onion Skin by Edgar Camacho (review)

Buoyed temporarily by severance pay from a dissatisfying job in a small ad agency, Rolando meets his soulmate, Nera, at the perfect time. Nera has also dropped off the work grid and camps out in a friend's abandoned food truck; with hard work and some modest investment, they rehab the truck the truck and hit the road, armed with optimism and two planters of a spice that Nera's grandmother had passed to her as the unique enhancement for family recipes. Their growing success is imperiled, though, when they unwittingly encroach on the territory of rival food truckers, the Hellpigs, who vandalize the truck and steal the spices. They refuse to withdraw meekly, and with the assistance of a feisty motel manager who had once suffered the Hellpigs' wrath, they stage an epic act of revenge that puts them on the lam but also puts the Hellpigs out of business for good. The plot is straightforward, but the structure of Camacho's graphic novel is anything but, unreeling into a mirrored funhouse of fractured episodes for readers to piece together. Those initially boggled by the dearth of segues will latch on to a clear timeline clue: Rolando's arm in a sling, signaling the story's "opening" event, the result of the on-purpose accident that leads our hero to Nera and his adventure. Fluid, sharp-edged rendering awash in dusky Southwestern hues nimbly blends setting and mood in this Mexican import; teens sensing uncertain adulthood looming uncomfortably close will find the darkness, tempered with a hopefully-ever-after ending, a resonant read.