A worthy, faithful companion to the prose novels.
A graphic novel adaptation of the Monsterjunkies YA adventure.
Talon and Pandora Monsterjunkie use their mansion in Foggy Point, Maine, as a sanctuary for rare and endangered creatures. In their care are the pituitary giants Frances and Betty, a pygmy elephant, a sea monster, and a sasquatch named Beau (among many others). The Monsterjunkies keep their lives as cryptozoologists private, fearing that the outside world might exploit or turn violent against them. Yet the Monsterjunkie children, Crow and Indigo, have the normal teenage desires to fit in and have friends. Talon and Pandora bring a few creatures to the kids’ schools for show and tell, dispelling some of the mystery shrouding the family. Indigo befriends a girl named Winter, and Crow eventually hits it off with a trio of classmates after they sneak onto the Monsterjunkies’ property (only to be terrified by Beau). Later, when a group of bullies picks on Winter, Crow and his friends are drawn into an escalating prank war. The lead bully, Ruth, is encouraged by his rich and powerful father, who’s busy using connections to run the Monsterjunkies out of town. Can the family rise above the prejudice of a hateful minority? This graphic novel adaptation by Jay Fotos Studios is delightfully faithful, in spirit and dialogue, to the original material. The art presents wide-eyed, smiling characters who skew fairly close to those found in Archie comics. The color palette is mostly subdued greens and browns, except for bolder colors that help the creatures jump from the panels. Shein and Gates’ important themes of standing against bullies without stooping to their levels and battling homophobia carry over from their novel. There’s also an anti-smoking and -drinking message, as Ruth and his evil father indulge frequently. For the wrap-up, the authors rely on realistic solutions to the Monsterjunkies’ problems—like Talon working less and being more available to Crow—which keeps the characters identifiable (and admirable) to readers of all ages. Fans will surely welcome a follow-up adaptation.
A worthy, faithful companion to the prose novels.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-99015-6
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Red Anvil Comics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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