In this review of The Boyfriend, a trade paperback from Nakama Press, a young teenager makes up a pretend boyfriend to get back at her twin sister. However, the boyfriend has come to life and no one will come between them.
The Boyfriend
Writer: Seth M Sherwood
Art: Elisa Pochetta
Page Count: 184 pages
Release Date: May 26, 2026
This review contains spoilers
The Boyfriend opens on teen twins Gina and Chloe walking home from the last day of school and instantly being forced into a summer vacation with their parents. Popular, extroverted Gina instantly makes friends and leaves gloomy, goth-lite Chloe to wander the beachside town on her own. The sisters’ antagonistic relationship begins to have deadly consequences when Chloe’s pretend boyfriend combines with the town’s ghost story and sets its sights on evening the score in Chloe’s favor.
The story is a perfect homage to teen slasher films with brutal depictions of gore, but the heart of the story is Gina and Chloe healing their relationship. While the first half of the book seems to be Gina relentlessly bullying Chloe, there is a later reveal that Chloe did something cruel to Gina earlier in the school year. Gina continues to (proudly) retaliate, not realizing how wide the rift between them has grown.
Author Seth Sherwood perfectly captures the frustrating feelings of conflicts between sisters: the difficulty of reconciling, of letting go of the hurt, and the contrasting pull, the need to maintain the connection. The drama and tension of these moments between the sisters is balanced perfectly with the scenes of horror as the mysterious monster draws ever closer, and with lighthearted moments of Chloe and Gina interacting with each other, their parents, and their friends.
One thing I didn’t like overall was the parents. In most horror stories that involve teens, the parents have to be gotten out of the way somehow, and in this case, it seems to be that they just have a fairly hands-off parenting style. However, the amount of outright bullying that Gina does to Chloe early on in the story seems difficult to overlook, even when Chloe doesn’t report all of it, or when she declines her mom’s offer to tell Gina to stop picking on Chloe. They just seem oblivious, too nonchalant about it all.
Artist Elisa Pocetta’s style gives a little bit of a classic Archie’s comics style with a 90’s shojo manga twist, and I mean that in the best way possible. It actually reminded me a lot of Gisèle Lagacé’s work on webcomics Penny and Aggie and Ménage à 3 in the 2010s, especially with the distinctive character designs and dynamic expressions. The monster design seemed to be leaning into body horror, especially in the scene when it was attempting to take on Chloe’s desired form in sync with her “boyfriend creation mode” on an app. Later in the story as the “boyfriend” begins to lose his form again, I would have liked to see the same visual emphasis rather than the fleshy tentacles/lumps that don’t have as much impact.
Final Thoughts
The Boyfriend is a fun read, I think it’ll do great for the YA crowd, but there’s definitely something to enjoy for older readers as well, especially if you have a sister.
