A fun, fast-paced ride with plenty of heart.
A clever underachiever must navigate the feared Kowloon Walled City in Liu’s winning manga.
In a colorful 1970s Hong Kong, 7-year-old Tiger, who “prefers to be clever rather than hardworking,” announces that he wants to be a superhero. He does so by leaping onto his teacher’s desk wearing an oversized cat’s head and declaring himself Cat Mask Boy, to the delight of his classmates. But his teacher disapproves, and so does his mother at home, who chases him around with a broom stick when he doesn’t do his homework and won’t take off his mask. Rather than improving through study, Tiger strikes a deal with a friend, Rocky: In exchange for Rocky’s homework, Tiger agrees to make him his own cat mask. The plan works, and Tiger is soon rewarded with his best-ever report card performance (though he’s still in the bottom three in the class). As a reward, they celebrate after school, and Tiger’s report card slips into a middle-aged man’s shopping bag. This sets Tiger on an adventure across the feared Kowloon Walled City, “a den of vice with gambling, drugs, and everything else.” Across the border, Tiger runs into Dragon, who’s a few years older and already a primary school dropout, wise beyond his years and similarly decked out in a cat mask. As he steers Tiger through the city in search of his report card, they grow closer as friends. While the stakes are low in terms of conflict, the everyday bullies and street toughs who stand in Tiger and Dragon’s path entertainingly assume the roles of powerful manga villains in boys’ imaginations. Liu, doing double duty as writer and illustrator, brings their confrontations to kinetic life in dazzling action sequences. The color palette throughout mixes bright tones with muted, darker reds, browns, greens, and plenty of white (including the black-and-white masks themselves). He is at his best in the final night sequences in the Walled City, where the Escher-like apartment buildings twist into each other as the friends try to escape before it’s too late.
A fun, fast-paced ride with plenty of heart.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781545821732
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nakama Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre (King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger; being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. The artist’s use of color is especially striking: His battle scenes are ample, bloodily scarlet affairs, and Polyphemus’s cave is a stifling orange; he depicts the underworld as a colorless, mirthless void, domestic spaces in warm tans, the all-encircling sea in a light Mediterranean blue and some of the far-away islands in almost tangibly growing greens. Don’t confuse this hefty, respectful adaptation with some of the other recent ones; this one holds nothing back and is proudly, grittily realistic rather than cheerfully cartoonish. Big, bold, beautiful. (notes) (Graphic classic. YA)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4266-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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