74 pages • 2 hours read
Raina TelgemeierSmile: A Graphic Novel
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 Summary
Raina spends her summer drawing, watching TV, and dreaming about Sean. Meanwhile, the braces shrink the gap in her top teeth to the point that she only needs one fake tooth. By the time eighth grade starts, she and her friends are all dealing with puberty. Raina gets upset as they call her new Bart Simpson shirt a boy’s shirt and mostly talk about their looks.
Melissa tells Raina that Sean is too focused on basketball to ever notice her, so Raina decides to try out for the women’s team. Sean greets her at the practice, but she fails to make the team. When discussing it with her family, her parents tell her that she could have broken her teeth again while playing. While passing notes in class, Melissa suggests drawing a picture for him instead, which freaks Raina out. Before she can respond, the teacher intercepts the message and reads it aloud to the class. Raina worries that Sean will find out but gets more upset when Melissa suggests that nobody cares about it.
The girls start to mingle with guys during lunch. While Raina sees them as immature and flirting practice for Sean, she appreciates that they talk about things other than beauty practices. Melissa goes to one of the boys’ graduation party and ends up in a game of Spin the Bottle. She sits in but turns down her chance to play. She tells Emily that she does not like how they treat kissing as disgusting and did not want her first kiss to be from any of these “gross” boys. She imagines a perfect kiss that she cannot have in her current state.
Dr. Dragoni tells Raina that her teeth are making progress and that soon he can remove the fake tooth and use bonding to make her new front teeth look natural. He is concerned about her gum health, however, and makes an appointment with the periodontist. It turns into the worst visit of the process: The periodontist cuts her gums while deep cleaning her teeth with a scalpel, and he neglects to wait for the novocaine to start working. Raina passes out after seeing her bruised mouth. Furious, her mother screams at the staff for doing the procedure without her permission and promises never to return. On the ride home, Raina tells her fuming mother that she was “pretty awesome.”
Chapter 6 Analysis
Chapter 6 begins with a full-page picture of Raina with books that will strongly influence her art and writing style. She is reading The Baby-sitters Club, which Telgemeier was creating graphic novel adaptations of while posting Smile as a webcomic. On the floor are two collections of newspaper comic strips: the For Better or for Worse collection The Last Straw and the first collection of Calvin & Hobbes. Both series are inspirations for her work; the former is a good-natured family comedy while the latter is sarcastic with an imaginative-but-flawed child protagonist. The drawing style and character expressions take cues from both strips, and since Smile began as a serialized work, individual pages often function as self-contained strips that end in punchlines.
Raina’s fixation on Sean infects everything in her life to the point that she attempts to join the women’s basketball team despite having minimal interest in the sport and overlooking the dangers to her teeth. Telgemeier plays the tryouts for comedic value as Raina believes she is doing well despite missing shots and struggling to keep up with the other players.
Chapter 6 exposes the reality that Raina wants the ideal that Sean embodies more than Sean himself. Now that Raina’s group includes both boys and girls, she knows that boys are interested in talking to her and do not care about her appearance. But, “None of them were Sean” (157), and the split between her perfectionism and the others’ casual flirting comes to a head when she plays Spin the Bottle, a game for teenagers who are curious about romance but still find kissing another person weird. Telgemeier uses animated body language and large fonts to depict the kisses and reactions. Raina’s face is visible for most of the panels, and she shows her anxiety at kissing one of the boys as well as her disdain when they laugh about it afterwards. She compares the experience to a dream sequence by a lake where she dances with a Sean-like beau. Telgemeier follows this dream with two contrasting panels: one of a slouching, curly haired, zit-covered Raina, and the other a full-page image of beauty products that supposedly cure these imperfections.
While Raina may not care for Dr. Dragoni’s cheeky attitude, the periodontist—a gum specialist—provides an example of how not to treat child patients. He is snide, performs a procedure without her mother’s permission, uses limited pain relievers, and rushes her out afterward. Telgemeier again uses a red background to depict the surgery, this time from Raina’s point of view as the periodontist and his assistant tower over her with devilish grins. To depict Raina’s wooziness, Telgemeier switches from boxed panels to slanted ones that only return to their standard form when Raina’s mother yells at the dentists.
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By Raina Telgemeier
