One of the immediate things that stands out in this book is that there are updates to the time period. This happens a lot in YA books, especially when they are more than 20 years old. In old Lois Duncan novels, someone has gone back to them and added some cellphones and internet searches here and there in weird little ways.
In this book, most of those changes are less unnatural and often occur at the art level, meaning something will be present in this text like a flatscreen tv or a cellphone that would not really have been part of the original text. The original book came out in 1999 or so, which means I was a junior in high school, and find myself looking back not only at that time in my life but also that time in America, which of course speaks to how much has changed at least in terms of conversations about the topic and sexual assault, rape, and trauma.
The art adds a dimension to the book that really offers up something different and new to the novel. The novel is very good, but the art allows for the kinds of emotional representations in graphic novels that work better visually, to the degree that a lot of YA books will have art in order to add that dimension. The book is still harrowing in this form, but the methods have shifted along the different medium. I was rereading it in part because I found this copy in a Little Free Library, and of course to see if it would get me fired. I hope it doesn’t!