An offbeat, action-packed thriller with a winning cast of diverse characters.
Two deaf orphans get in trouble while attending a special-needs school in writer Sebela and illustrator Stoll’s graphic novel.
Haley and Max’s mother dies in the book’s opening pages, leaving the teenagers without a father or other relatives willing to raise them. They’re sent to the Wayfair Academy for Special Needs, where they meet a diverse group of other deaf young people. Haley quickly makes friends and finds out that one of her new pals, Lexa, is struggling to pay for school and may have to leave. Haley proposes a daring solution: a burglary. She gathers her new group of friends to do the heist, which initially seems like a success—until the person they robbed appears in Haley’s room and tells them that they’ll have to work for him to repay him for everything they took, or else. Soon, Haley and her buddies-turned-accomplices are learning the skills of professional thieves and go on missions around town. However, what starts as a thrill quickly becomes a trap—one that Haley and her team must find a way to escape. This briskly paced tale, which takes a few time-jumps, smartly zooms in on its tense heist and action sequences. The core cast is realistically diverse; one character uses they/them pronouns and is selectively mute, another is late-deafened, and several were born deaf. Sign language is also incorporated into the storytelling, with speech bubbles emerging from hand motions and black lines highlighting movement. However, there’s an occasional overreliance on narration as past-tense confession. Although this adds some depth to the story, there are moments when images alone could have carried it; several standout sequences allow Stoll’s cinematic visuals to take over for a few pages at a time. The images feature detailed character work and Ocean’s 11–style blocking, with bright pops of color—vivid reds, pinks, oranges, and blues—regularly lighting up the background, contrasting with often black-clad main characters. The story reaches a satisfying conclusion, but it sows enough seeds for potential sequels.
An offbeat, action-packed thriller with a winning cast of diverse characters.Pub Date: July 7, 2021
ISBN: 9781952303098
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Immensely enjoyable.
The debut graphic novel from Mohamed presents a modern Egypt full of magical realism where wishes have been industrialized and heavily regulated.
The story opens with a televised public service announcement from the General Committee of Wish Supervision and Licensing about the dangers of “third-class wishes”—wishes that come in soda cans and tend to backfire on wishers who aren’t specific enough (like a wish to lose weight resulting in limbs falling from the wisher’s body). Thus begins a brilliant play among magic, the mundane, and bureaucracy that centers around a newsstand kiosk where a devout Muslim is trying to unload the three “first-class wishes” (contained in elegant glass bottles and properly licensed by the government) that have come into his possession, since he believes his religion forbids him to use them. As he gradually unloads the first-class wishes on a poor, regretful widow (who then runs afoul of authorities determined to manipulate her out of her valuable commodity) and a university student who seeks a possibly magical solution to their mental health crisis (but struggles with whether a wish to always be happy might have unintended consequences), interstitials give infographic histories of wishes, showing how the Western wish-industrial complex has exploited the countries where wishes are mined (largely in the Middle East). The book is exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics. Mohamed’s art balances perfectly between cartoon and realism, powerfully conveying emotions, and her strong, clean lines gorgeously depict everything from an anguished face to an ornate bottle. Charts and graphs nicely break up the reading experience while also concisely building this larger world of everyday wishes. Mohamed has a great sense of humor, which comes out in footnotes and casual asides throughout.
Immensely enjoyable.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74841-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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