Library Journal weighs in on Trampoline.

Here's what Lisa Peet, Associate Editor of News & Features for Library Journal, says about Trampoline on the Library Journal website:
"There are the books you like, and the books you love, and then there are the ones you want to hold to your heart for a minute after you turn the last page. Robert Gipe’s illustrated novel Trampoline (Ohio Univ.) is one of those—not just well written, which it is; and not just visually appealing, which the wonderfully deadpan black-and-white drawings make sure of; but there is something deeply lovable about it, an undertow of affection you couldn’t fight if you wanted to. Or I couldn’t, anyway. Coming-of-age stories are supposed to do that, aren’t they?—make you love their young heroes or heroines, no matter how difficult they might be. And most, I find, don’t. But Gipe has done it with 15-year-old Dawn Jewell, growing up at the end of the Nineties in a poor Kentucky mining town with a sprawling (in more ways than one) dysfunctional family, as well as loyal and not-so-loyal friends, drugs and moonshine, strip mining activism, car wrecks, Black Flag on the radio, and a sympathetic DJ. And Gipe deftly avoids every single cliché that could trip such a story up, which includes having a pitch-perfect ear for dialect and making it into something marvelous. There are arrests, fights, bad reputations—”When they showed up, it was like it started raining washing machines. Things got broke.”—and fierce scraps of beauty pulled from anywhere Dawn can find them. Trampoline is a wonder. It’s not out until April, but you can catch a couple of chapters on the publisher’s website."