Lucy Snow makes a wrong turn while traveling to her new boarding school and finds herself at Miss Weaver’s Academy for the Scientifically Gifted and Ethically Unfettered, a.k.a. Hollow Fields. Before she knows it, she’s enrolled and bound by contract to do the best she can at her studies. And they mean her best, because the student with the lowest GPA at the end of the week is sent to detention in the windmill–and no student who has gone there has ever returned!
Rosca’s series has gotten a lot of acclaim for its art, winning an International Manga Award in Japan in 2007, and it’s not hard to see why. She’s at home drawing both fantasy and science-fiction and she combines the two styles into an interesting and unique world. Her setting is part steampunk, part Hogwarts, with a dash of mad-scientist. Cogs are everywhere in the gothic castle that makes up Hollow Fields. The characters are either cute–the children–or creepy–the teachers. The later are all stitched together, held into their bodies only by an evil power. The former, though, are adorable, even when backstabbing one another other in class.
The pace of the story is almost breathtaking, even at 500+ pages….
This review was originally posted at Good Comics for Kids. Please visit the original post to see the rest of the review.
Hollow Fields Omnibus
Madeline Rosca
ISBN 978-1-934876-72-5
Seven Seas, September 2009
