A light, breezy mystery that will leave readers looking forward to the next episode.
Vermont private eye Jonathan Levy investigates the disappearance of a mysterious woman’s daughter in Norman’s third graphic novel in a series, illustrated by Bakst.
Levy begins this episode by visiting his partner Alexa Sands’ gallery collection of 22 photographs, all taken on the same day and featuring the same elegant, older woman sitting in the background; Sands has no idea who she is. By the show’s end, all the photos have sold but one of war brides arriving on a steamship in Halifax in 1938, which Sands claims isn’t her own. Levy and Sands decide to call the number on the photo and are surprisingly connected to the aforementioned older woman: “I am at the inn at Montpelier, Room 105. My name is Bettina Eldersveld. I am Dutch by birth.” It turns out that she has a case for Levy, who’s a Montpelier-based private detective: She wants to know what happened to her daughter, with whom she hasn’t had any contact in 45 years; the only clue she has is a postcard. Alongside this central mystery is the story of the developing relationship between Levy and Sands, who are engaged to be married. In this volume, Sands introduces him to another aspect of her life: séances. She won’t get married, she says, until she has approval from the spirit world. Somewhat oddly inserted into all of this is the abrupt appearance of scenes from Veronica Lake movies; it’s eventually revealed that there’s a film festival in town, and Sands feels some sort of spiritual connection with the actor. This aspect of Norman’s series entry never fully coheres with the rest of the work, and the actual detective work on display is brief to the point of lacking adequate suspense. However, there’s a soft, gentle, and playful tone to the work that will appeal to readers looking for a nontraditional detective story. Bakst’s painterly grayscale artwork is likewise low-key, with smudged edges that give most pages an expressionistic look.
A light, breezy mystery that will leave readers looking forward to the next episode.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781578691807
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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