The story follows a girl's soccer team as they compete against the boy's team for a spot at the championship.

The art style of this graphic novel is so charming! It looks like it's drawn with marker and it adds such a childlikeness to it! While the story mainly focuses on Barbara as she tries to achieve her goal of winning a championship before graduating high school it does a great job of showing the friendship between the girls. Overall I enjoyed this graphic novel and recommend it for anyone looking for a unique read!

Review to come! Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I really enjoyed it and as someone living in Australia it felt like I was reading about the Matildas!! (No joke the Matilda effect is so real here and as a girlie heading into sport in my mid 20s I am obsessed.)

Soccer is so sick and women's sport is very rad. It was very fun and sweet to read a comic about both! I'd say this is definitely a special one for all the young girls growing up who face gender inequality in sports.

While we don't delve much into the other characters, it was awesome to see the diversity of the characters. (Hate Chantal though.) I really appreciated seeing the different types of relationships that Barbara has with the various people in her life which is so real. We see the rocky-ness with her mother, the will it-won't it with Bilal, the connection with her coach and the joy and camaraderie with her teammates.

While there is variety to the panelling, I would have loved to see way more creative use of space. Especially as I grew up on graphic novels, I want to see the characters being part of the negative space and interacting with the panel boxes. Sometimes the action sequences were rather hard to follow as each panel felt very still and didn't necessarily flow or indicate movement.

Regardless this is a special and important story for the young ladies in sports to read!!! This is your gentle reminder that sports is so amazing and you should join a team even casually or recreationally and back the women's' teams!

Thank you to NetGalley and Fantagraphics Books for providing me with the eARC and the opportunity to read and provide an honest review!

Great story about a girl's soccer team in the suburbs of Paris dealing with sexism (and learning that sometimes there's not anything you can do about it! that last page was a blow to the head!), and some absolutely gorgeous marker hued art to accompany it.

This was a wonderful graphic novel about passion and one’s ability to fight for what they believe and dream for, even when all the odds are stacked against them. The book shows sexism and how it affects sports and students. The illustrations were unique and colourful. I’m glad I had the opportunity to read this book.

Soccer is Barbara’s passion. As team captain she is so excited that her high school team the Rosigny Roses have qualified after two years to make it to the nationals. However, the club president has pulled the plug. The Roses play second fiddle to the boys team as they are made a priority to go to the nationals forcing the girls team to forfeit. This infuriates Barbara as it is a blatant example of gender bias in sports. Barbara and her team find loopholes and workarounds to play in the championship with minimum support from Barbara’s mother and boyfriend.

I was not crazy about the art style nor the color. The color was extremely bold and very in your face. There were red splotches across the girls’ cheeks where to indicate blushing or anger but looked very awkward and misplaced. What’s up with that? It’s as if someone took a broad paint brush and splashed paint across their cheeks, not an attractive look.

This was a French to English translated story. As a basketball fan, I had the impression it was basketball themed (my mistake) but it turned out to be a soccer story, which would appeal to wider audiences. I enjoyed the story just fine, but just didn’t care for the overall design.

Interesting t0 read a book from Fantagraphics that more or less moves into YA territory, albeit in a realistic, grounded manner, and there is a kind of romance substory.

The story involves a girls' football team (a soccer team, for Americans), the Rosigny Roses, in a Paris banlieu. The club also has a boys' football team, and sadly they are getting more attention and money from the club's managers, implying that the boys are better footballers.

So a story follows about trying to prove that the girls are ready to enter championshops just as much as the boys, while the main character, the captain of the Rosigny Roses, Barbara, has a mother who is worried about how much time all this football will take away from her schoolwork. And then she falls in love with one of the boys from the other team..

The book is beautifully drawn, with felt-tip pens, very colourful. Some lovely depictions of football, and I don't even really like football (I know, bad European!).

Wonderful, for young and older readers.

Full of colors and energy, this was a pleasant and lighthearted read. Thank you to the publishers for this advance readers' copy!

I wanted more. More for feminism. More soccer. The ending wasn’t storybook satisfying. It was reality of a crappy soccer manager in France. The characters were close to being one-note except for the main ones.

Fue lindo ver el dibujo, pero tener la burbuja de dialogo en blanco? mamita, deja mucho que desear el libro. Hubiera estado bueno que, si me van a garantizar el "deseo" de darme el arc, me hubiesen dado el comic completo.

This is fine. Some of the slang feels forced and cringey, and the way the ending is conveyed feels too abrupt in its disappointment. It's a solid way to highlight inequality in sports, though.

This was overall an okay read, but the story wasn't overly interesting and none of the characters particularly likeable.
I also found the coach's behaviour towards the players kind of concerning occasionally (it seemed like he was crossing boundaries sometimes) and it was never addressed within the story... I wasn't a fan of that.

do you remember back when you were young and you cared about something so much that it doesn't make sense to the adults around you? season of the roses is a prime addition to these types of stories where the triumph is having convinced someone that what you're passionate about is worth the effort. here, the domain is football (or soccer) and everything that comes with being in a male dominated sport. even though i saw it coming, i was just upset that the world hasn't changed all that much when it comes to gender equality.

I felt like this graphic novel was made by British soccer teammates passing a notebook back and forth and dreaming about what would happen this season. I enjoyed the lived-in feeling of the art and the characters. Like everyone else, I had a hard time pinning down the setting, the outfits and hair felt 90s, and the slang felt mid-2000s, but I assume it is meant to be current. I am sorely disappointed in how the ending was presented. We dedicated pages to sex and singular players, but we couldn't get a real ending. It would have been better to leave it unsaid.

The first thing that made me pay attention to this graphic novel was its interesting art style and the vibrant colour palette. The second thing was the story itself. Although hopeful it shows the difficulty many girls and women have to go through in comparison to men who in this case gate everything served on a silver platter without even trying very hard or actually being good at football. Is it still, even this year, necessary to talk about the inequality? Isn't it something that's supposed to be extinct? As we can see, based on this story, it's still something very real, something so many women have to deal with today, something ruining many dreams. I don't consider it a perfect representation of struggles with inequality but it's a great example of a book that could be recommended to show the importance of this issue.

The cover is what attracted my eye to this title. I loved the colourful felt tip pen illustrations. The art made the story more approachable to me as a reader. ,I love the message and would love to know if there is a sequel planned.