SEE YOU IN MEMORIES

In So’s graphic novel, a woman awakens to find that she’s been missing for three years and tries to remember where she’s been.

Billie Lee wakes up in bed with her father by her side. Confused, she learns that she ran away three years earlier and has been missing ever since—she was recently found lying in the street with a sketchbook in her hand. Billie doesn’t even remember the argument she had with her father that led to her running away, let alone where she’s been for the past three years. Guided by the sketchbook she was found with, she visits various places throughout the city, trying to find something to jog her memories. The more she studies the sketches, the weirder they seem; they’re not in any obvious kind of order, and despite some of the locations being busy thoroughfares, there are no people in the drawings. Billie comes upon a closed-down gallery. There’s a sketch of it in the book, and she gets a sudden memory of passing the location after running away from her home. With a rush, the memories come back: Billie had seen a painting in the gallery, and when she got closer, she found herself falling through the frame and floating down into an empty city. It’s not totally empty—she soon meets Baron Cheung, who introduces her to a world that exists in “a period of ‘reverse flow,’” where time moves backward and nothing new can be created. How could Billie and Baron exist in this reverse world for so long, and how did Billie find her way back home? In this stunningly illustrated graphic novel, So pens a tale of two people who find each other and discover how a reversal of time can affect their own creativity and life back in the real world. The story is compelling and thought-provoking, but the art is what really makes the work shine. The subtle hints of time moving backward—such as smoke and damage lessening after a fire—delight throughout the novel. This volume includes the artist’s sketchbook.

A beautifully illustrated and mind-bending speculative tale.