As I Dream of You
Written by Jennifer Lee; illus. by LeUyen Pham
First loves can be intense, all consuming, and, for romance fans, the best kind of fodder for a good story; when tinged with tragedy and brought to life vividly, they can live on in the reader’s mind as much as a happily-ever-after. In this month’s Big Picture, author Jennifer Lee and illustrator LeUyen Pham offer up a romance to remember when high schoolers Franny and Sam’s innocent meet-cute turns into a passionate connection. The two leads fall headlong into a relationship that is at once easy and deeply profound, but their bond is put to the test when they’re in a deadly car accident. Lee’s contemplation on young love, grief, and the afterlife is captivating in its own right, but Pham brings a cinematographer’s eye to the narrative, compelling the reader to feel every emotion that makes up this gorgeous exemplar of the graphic novel format.
When Sam collides with new girl Franny in their school hallway in classic rom-com form, it’s love at first sight. He’s drawn to her musical talents, witty mind, and playful nature, and she falls quickly for this gentle, stargazing guy with a thoughtful appreciation of nature. The next year is a rush of passion, love, and plenty of lust, but there are also smaller moments of sweetness and care: Franny is a safe place for Sam to work through his grief over his dead mother while Sam reminds Franny that her parents’ toxic relationship is not the fate of all couples. Unfortunately, heartbreak still comes, here in the form of a devastating car crash. Sam, however, is certain that their love can defy death, and begins researching the afterlife, hoping to find a happier ending than that of Orpheus and Eurydice, a myth that the two first bonded over. He manages to connect with Franny on the astral plane, but even as the two spend their nights soaring through the sky and making out in fields of flowers, darker forces are at play, and it’s soon clear that death will have the ultimate say.
Lee delicately unfolds this doomed romance with the utmost compassion, telling the story mostly through dialogue between Franny and Sam and priming readers for heartbreak with the initial portrayal of a swoony, intimate connection. Franny and Sam understand each other at their very cores, and despite the challenges of their childhoods, the book deftly eschews trauma bonding, instead conveying their dual experiences of feeling truly seen by one another. Given the intensity of their lightning-strike chemistry, Sam’s almost manic pursuit of any way to reconnect with Franny after the accident rings with such a painful authenticity that their reunion on the astral plane is easily accepted if not entirely explained. Still, the earlier ease is gone, their chatty banter replaced with separate, narrative reflections that grow desperate. Lee sensitively handles an on-page suicide attempt to make clear that, while the lovers must part, both life and love can go on.
The story’s emotional depth is amplified tenfold by illustrations so immersive, so dynamic that they effortlessly sweep readers into the trajectory of Franny and Sam’s romance. Readers see their initial attraction in close-ups of stolen glances, bit lips, and fidgeting hands, and then their all-encompassing devotion in expansive scenes that follow the couple with sweeping, curving lines and almost kinetic paneling. Pham’s skillfully composed scenes, digitally penciled and inked in Procreate, play with both proportion and negative space to give brutal visual clarity to the sense of absence both Sam and Franny feel in the aftermath of the crash. Sam is curled around himself in the bed, diminished in a room all the larger for having no one else in it, and elsewhere Sam and Franny stand on the opposite ends of a full spread, the gray, damp fog between them a separation as sharp as any dialogue. The stark contrast to earlier scenes of their colliding bodies, with little space between them, conveys with a visceral blow how absolutely lost these two are without each other.
A heart-wrenching twist only confirms Lee’s and Pham’s brilliance here, and a second read will show how, through palette shifts and voiceovers, author and illustrator were subtly moving readers toward a deeper understanding of what it looks like to move on. This one is for the hopeless romantics, the ones who watch Titanic on repeat and whose copies of Romeo and Juliet are dog-eared and well-worn.
—Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor
Cover illustration from As I Dream of You. Text copyright © Jennifer Lee. Illustrations copyright © 2026 LeUyen Pham. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, First Second.
