As a portrait of life under a repressive regime, this retelling successfully highlights the sisters' impossible choices.
Religion, family, and revolutionary values are put to the test in this visually striking interpretation of Alvarez’s bestselling 1994 novel about the shifting loyalties of the Mirabal sisters.
Before launching into the story's multiple perspectives, Quiles provides a helpful spread of family photos ranging from 1938 to 1994. No one was truly safe during the years of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, but Dedé Mirabal has the unhappy distinction of being the only one of four sisters who survived the era. With each sister getting her own color palette in Quiles' interpretation, Dedé sets out to tell her niece Minou the tragic intertwined stories of Patria, Minerva, and María Theresa, wanting Minou to know the real women behind the legendary "butterflies." Patria, the eldest Mirabal, is bathed in yellow-orange as she contemplates becoming a nun. Instead, she starts a family with her husband, Pedrito, and eventually starts letting her sister Minerva’s revolutionary group meet on her land. Minerva, with a green background, devotes herself to the revolutionary cause early when she makes a school friend named Sinita, who confides that Trujillo killed her uncles, who'd been working against him. The youngest sister, María Theresa, starts out with optimism in her pinkish-purple hue as she writes in her diary. While Trujillo and his cronies circle the Mirabals, they each respond differently to the danger. Quiles keeps the character figures relatively simple and their clothing plain, adding the most detail in panels with close-ups of eyes. Whether scared or in love or caught in religious thrall, the eyes are the windows to the Mirabal sisters’ souls.
As a portrait of life under a repressive regime, this retelling successfully highlights the sisters' impossible choices.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781643753768
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
Even so, this remains Macbeth, arguably the Bard of Avon’s most durable and multilayered tragedy, and overall, this enhanced...
A pairing of the text of the Scottish Play with a filmed performance, designed with the Shakespeare novice in mind.
The left side of the screen of this enhanced e-book contains a full version of Macbeth, while the right side includes a performance of the dialogue shown (approximately 20 lines’ worth per page). This granular focus allows newcomers to experience the nuances of the play, which is rich in irony, hidden intentions and sudden shifts in emotional temperature. The set and costuming are deliberately simple: The background is white, and Macbeth’s “armor” is a leather jacket. But nobody’s dumbing down their performances. Francesca Faridany is particularly good as a tightly coiled Lady Macbeth; Raphael Nash-Thompson gives his roles as the drunken porter and a witch a garrulousness that carries an entertainingly sinister edge. The presentation is not without its hiccups. Matching the video on the right with the text on the left means routinely cutting off dramatic moments; at one point, users have to swipe to see and read the second half of a scene’s closing couplet—presumably an easy fix. A “tap to translate” button on each page puts the text into plain English, but the pop-up text covers up Shakespeare’s original, denying any attempts at comparison; moreover, the translation mainly redefines more obscure words, suggesting that smaller pop-ups for individual terms might be more meaningful.
Even so, this remains Macbeth, arguably the Bard of Avon’s most durable and multilayered tragedy, and overall, this enhanced e-book makes the play appealing and graspable to students . (Enhanced e-book. 12 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: The New Book Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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