The richly satisfying conclusion won’t keep readers from demanding a third volume.
Addie has finally made her big score: Does that mean she and her little sister can escape the Spill Zone?
When the Spill occurred three years ago, Addie and Lexa’s parents became two of the thousands of floating corpses in the wasteland that was Poughkeepsie, New York. Addie has made ends meet by selling photographs of the bizarre conditions inside the Zone, and she possesses growing paranormal abilities thanks to a very close encounter with “the dust.” Now that she’s sold an artifact from the Zone for $1 million, she can leave. However, Lexa’s possessed rag doll, Vespertine, has other ideas for the family, and the North Koreans—who had a similar incident—have sent their Spill survivor, a youth named Don Jae, to investigate conditions in Poughkeepsie. Of course, the American government has their eyes on the situation too. Vespertine’s eventual revelations about the nature of the Spill harden Addie’s resolve to get out…but also make the situation so much more complex. Bestseller Westerfeld’s (Nexus, 2018, etc.) second installment is the quintessential page-turner. Groundwork laid in the first volume pays off in nearly nonstop action here. Puvilland’s (Spill Zone, 2017, etc.) colorful, jagged, totally alien art is the perfect partner for this trippy tale. Addie and Lexa are white, Jae is Korean, and there is diversity in secondary characters.
The richly satisfying conclusion won’t keep readers from demanding a third volume. (Graphic novel. 12-adult)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62672-150-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Distinguished by a keen sense of period detail and sharp pacing: Geary serves his subject with dignity and grace.
The author/illustrator of Jack the Ripper (1995) continues to focus on Victorian crime in this latest historical comic, part of a series on 19th-century murder, based on a true-life story so compelling it inspired a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. While Poe was intrigued by the philosophy of detection in the case, Geary’s apparent interest lies in its revelations about urban lowlife of mid–19th-century New York City. His thick-lined black-and-white narrative, with its loose, curvy edges and distinctive bulbous lettering, well suits this historical curiosity. Geary’s well-researched book recounts the mysterious death of Mary Rogers, a young single woman who lived with her mother near present-day City Hall. When her corpse washed up on the western side of the Hudson River, many journalists became fascinated by the possible reasons for her fate. Was she an innocent, brutally murdered by one of the boarders at her mother’s house? Was she killed by a jealous lover or by one of the many male admirers who patronized the tobacco store where she worked? Or was it a botched abortion? These questions captured the imagination of the contemporary public and press because, in Geary’s view, Mary’s story was a powerful cautionary tale of emerging city life, which the artist illuminates in many sidebar historical drawings. Unsolved in part because of the period’s inadequate forensic techniques, the story becomes “a testament to the unknown and unknowable,” and Geary’s visual airiness perfectly captures the mysteriousness at its core. This is certainly a far cry from his early work for National Lampoon and Heavy Metal.
Distinguished by a keen sense of period detail and sharp pacing: Geary serves his subject with dignity and grace.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56163-274-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget all the teachers who told you that a story comes to rest with a pleasing finality. In Wintner’s world, characters...
The superficial concerns of Wintner’s characters, evident in earlier fiction (Homunculus, p. 419, etc.), are here given ten variations in a collection of vaguely interesting people thinking moderately deep thoughts about unstartling things.
Wintner might have completed his title by adding “and not a condom to be found.” Most of these stories involve men and women sleeping together for whatever reasons, their coupling a cathartic apex of murmuring doubts and hidden thoughts. Everybody asks about condoms, but nobody has one. In the most fully realized tale, middle-aged Dezmun Deyung makes a mint selling chicken innards for crab bait and as a logical consequence gets to sleep with a local college girl. Some pages away, a middle-aged woman with a great body schemes to bed the lifeguard at the local pool, and succeeds in consummating an affair that ends in guilt and redemption. In still another piece, a dog explains how much he has learned about love. When, in another, a middle-aged, recently divorced man who regrets having said something mean to his algebra teacher in high school calls her up; she is all too happy to have intercourse with him. In the title story, a middle-aged tourist in Fiji hooks up with a local girl, goes shopping, and insists they go back to her “third world” cement home. There, he unloads the groceries; Nita Nancy and her sister pee in the dirt; and the tourist has sex with her, intending to procreate. Sadly, this gesture of cross-cultural spawning is forgotten as he returns to his wife and children.
Forget all the teachers who told you that a story comes to rest with a pleasing finality. In Wintner’s world, characters drift aimlessly through their lives while readers long in vain for something beyond ribald humor that might produce a satisfying pause.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57962-028-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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