A quick read for fans.
A high school senior works to reinvent himself and inadvertently discovers his mutant superpowers.
Garfield Logan is a self-deprecating 17-year-old with green-streaked hair and an obsession with working out and eating so he can bulk his way up to becoming popular with girls. It’s almost the end of the school year, and nothing on his bucket list has been accomplished: He doesn’t have the girl, he doesn’t have the income from the pizza job he wants, and he is very much on the outside of the in crowd. Fed up with being alternately ignored and bullied by the cool kids, Gar completes an outrageous dare that instantly gains him a following and new nickname, Beast Boy. Precariously balancing his new popularity and some unexpected physical transformations with maintaining his true, close friendships, Gar successfully goes with the flow until things get dangerously out of hand. This follow-up to Teen Titans: Raven (2019) serves its purpose in providing an origin story for Beast Boy and connecting the series storylines with recurring characters but without the high-stakes action, intrigue, and depth of the former. Although the visuals are dotted with bursts of brightness and creative framing, the story is weakened by outdated language, insufficient character development, and a scattered plot. A neurodivergent character is identified within the text while racial diversity is represented in illustrations.
A quick read for fans. (author and illustrator forewords) (Graphic fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4012-8719-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: DC
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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