Inbetweens

by Nic | Dec 15, 2025

Twin sisters Sloane and Ash love to draw. For years, they have dreamed of becoming animators, working on movies like the Disney films they love. Now, at thirteen, they are taking the first step toward making that dream a reality: both girls have been accepted to a prestigious local animation summer program. Sloane is nervous, but she’s always nervous about starting new things and meeting new people. Ash can’t wait to learn from the pros—including the maker of her favorite animated movie, Monstrous.

Despite Sloane’s first-day jitters, both girls make friends at the program right away. But Ash soon finds herself struggling with the challenging animation assignments, and the creator of Monstrous isn’t the encouraging mentor figure she hoped for. Meanwhile, Sloane does well with the assignments, but is starting to question whether a career in animation is really what she wants. While Ash pushes herself hard to try and improve her craft, Sloane worries about how Ash will handle the idea of losing their shared goal.

The summer is teaching the twins a lot: about art skills, about different paths in animation (not all roads lead to Disney!), and about themselves. These discoveries are sometimes stressful, putting pressure on Sloane and Ash’s relationship. But if they listen to each other, their new friends, and an unexpected mentor from the animation program, then this could be a summer of exciting new possibilities.

These characters have a lot going on emotionally. Ash’s enthusiasm helps her connect to people, but can spiral into a stressful kind of overexcitement. Sloane struggles with discovering that art, her passion, feels more like a chore at animation camp. New friend Nisha used to bond with her grandmother over drawing, but is now losing that connection to her grandmother’s dementia. Two of the animation instructors provide an interesting contrast: Douglas Frye is has had exactly the kind of career Ash wants, working at Disney before starting his own studio. Ash is starstruck by him, but eventually comes to realize he’s an unhelpful teacher, a bit self-obsessed, and seems to unfairly favor male students over female ones. Film studies teacher Lisa Sato doesn’t have Frye’s celebrity sparkle, but she offers supportive advice and introduces her students to different styles of animation and career path possibilities.

Like author/illustrator Faith Erin Hicks, Sloane and Ash are aspiring young artists in Canada in what seems to be the 90s. (The exact year is never stated, but the characters watch VHS tapes, the newest film explicitly referenced came out in 1989, and anime is not yet mainstream in North America.) Hicks worked in the animation industry before switching to graphic novels, so she also has that experience to draw on (pun not intended but also not deleted) in creating the animation summer camp and its instructors.

The art style will be familiar to fans of Hicks’ work: a slightly cartoonified realism, expressive and dynamic, rich with detail. Given that animation is art plus movement, it is interesting to read a story centered on it in a medium that does not move. We see lots of drawing exercises from the summer program, like animating a bouncing ball or a person walking. We also see Sloane being introduced to anime, which she finds thrilling and inspiring in a time when she is struggling to reignite her passion for drawing. The book illustrates Ash and Sloane’s experience of spending a summer immersed in art.

Inbetweens shows us a fun, challenging, important summer in the lives of its young protagonists. It doesn’t tie up every little thing, like Ash’s trouble with overexcitement or Sloane’s questions about her future, but it ends in a happy and hopeful place. And after all, these characters are thirteen, so it makes sense that they don’t have everything figured out. Hand Inbetweens to fans of middle grade realistic fiction, especially those who like school stories or film and animation.

Inbetweens
By Faith Erin Hicks
Macmillan First Second, 2026
ISBN: 9781250838742

Company Age Rating: 10-14

NFNT Age Recommendation: Middle Grade (7-11), Tween (10-13)
Creator Representation:  Canadian,