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
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times...
A bland, uninspired graphic adaptation of the Bard’s renowned love story.
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times oddly psychedelic-tinged backgrounds of cool blues and purples, the mood is strange, and the overall ambiance of the story markedly absent. Appealing to what could only be a high-interest/low–reading level audience, McDonald falls short of the mark. He explains a scene in an open-air tavern with a footnote—“a place where people gather to drink”—but he declines to offer definitions for more difficult words, such as “dirges.” While the adaptation does follow the foundation of the play, the contemporary language offers nothing; cringeworthy lines include Benvolio saying to Romeo at the party where he first meets Juliet, “Let’s go. It’s best to leave now, while the party’s in full swing.” Nagar’s faces swirl between dishwater and grotesque, adding another layer of lost passion in a story that should boil with romantic intensity. Each page number is enclosed in a little red heart; while the object of this little nuance is obvious, it’s also unpleasantly saccharine. Notes after the story include such edifying tidbits about Taylor Swift and “ ‘Wow’ dialogs from the play” (which culls out the famous quotes).Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-93-80028-58-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
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