An inspiring and surprisingly comedic tale of loss and acceptance told largely through silent sequential narrative, About Betty’s Boob is a seminal work from master storytellers Véro Cazot and Julie Rocheleau. Betty lost her left breast, her job, and her guy. She does not know it yet, but this is the best day of her life.
(Publisher Description)
About Betty’s Boob
By Vero Cazot
Art By Julie Rocheleau
ISBN: 9781684151646
Archaia, 2018
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+)
The forest is a dangerous place for any animal, especially one as small as a mouse. In the past, the mouse world endured a tyrannical Weasel Warlord until a noble band of mouse soldiers fought back. Ever since, the Mouse Guard has defended the paces and prosperity of its kingdom. For generations, this league of scouts, weather-watchers, trailblazers, and protectors has passed won its knowledge and skills.
Now three of the Guard’s finest have been dispatched. The mission seems simple: They are to find a missing mouse, a grain merchant who never arrived at his destination. But when they find him, they make a shocking discovery—one that involves a treacherous betrayal, a stolen secret, and a rising power that has only one goal: to bring down the Guard…
(Publisher Description)
This title has not (yet) been reviewed by our staff, but it is a title that we highly recommend for the majority of libraries building collections for this age range.
Mouse Guard
By David Peterson
ISBN: 9781932386578
Archaia, 2007
NFNT Age Recommendation: Tween (10-13)
In the world of Mouse Guard, mice struggle to live safely and prosper amongst harsh conditions and a host of predators. Thus the Mouse Guard was formed: more than just soldiers that fight off intruders, they are guides for common mice looking to journey without confrontation from one hidden village to another. The Guard patrol borders, find safeways and paths through dangerous territories and treacherous terrain, watch weather patterns, and keep the mouse territories free of predatory infestation. They do so with fearless dedication so that they might not just exist, but truly live. Saxon, Kenzie and Lieam, three such Guardsmice, are dispatched to find a missing merchant mouse that never arrived at his destination. Their search for the missing mouse reveals much more than they expect, as they stumble across a traitor in the Guard’s own ranks.
(Publisher Description)
Mouse Guard
By David Peterson
ISBN: 9781932386943
Arcahia, 2010
NFNT Age Recommendation: Middle Grade (7-11)
I found this memoir a pleasure to read, easy to digest and an insightful candid look at the growth of the author from her early experiences as teenager in New York City in the 1980s through to adulthood. Author Cecil Castellucci, an award-winning young adult novelist and comic book writer, aspired to be an award-winning film maker. The memoir recounts her early experiences as she follows her artistic and definite dreams and popular culture influences. The fact that she eventually succeeds in her telling stories in a different type of visual format is only alluded to but not the focus of the memoir itself. Along the way we meet numerous celebrities who intersect her path, such as Andy Warhol and Cher. We also meet good friends, childhood crushes, and a variety of muses.
This reviewer particularly appreciated Castellucci’s reflections on the act of memory and the way it shapes our self knowledge and on the power of stories: how they are molded through our memories and how people are fashioned by the stories/memories they tell about themselves. Her ongoing contemporary conversations with her father, Vincent F. Castellucci, a neuroscientist who specializes in the formation of memories, ground the adult author (and the reader) as she worked to create the memoir of her younger self. The positive relationship Castellucci has with both of her supportive parents is refreshing and inspiring, demonstrating how mutual love and support can contribute to success, regardless of the field of study.
The memoir engages the talents of four separate illustrators, a constructional element that does not distract from the unified whole of the novel. Each of the artists employ their own style on specific periods of Castellucci’s life, bringing each era to life with background details, contemporary hair and clothing styles, and the richness of facial expressions as Castellucci moves from a pre-teen through adulthood both in the Montreal of her home and New York of her schooling dreams. The book is constructed in the four distinct parts, each reflecting different story elements of the author’s life: childhood, young adult, college age, and the study of memory. Melissa Duffy’s insightful and energetic illustrations successfully illustrate the melodrama of the pre-teen years. V. Gagnon is charged with bringing Castellucci’s teenage years to life and Jon Berg, with the time spent in college and traveling abroad. Vicky Leta quietly and meditatively reflects the adult Cecil and the conversations with her parents as she constructs this memoir with pastel colours and unadorned backgrounds. The colour palate of all four illustrators effectively guide the reader through the drama, mood, and era of each segment of the author’s story.
Highly recommended for young adult readers even though the book is marketed as an adult title.
Girl on Film: A graphic novel memoir
By Cecil Castellucci
Art by Vicky Leta, Jon Berg, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon
ISBN: 9781684154531
Archaia, 2019
Publisher Age Rating: Adult
There’s a secret in a house made of bones in the middle of the woods. John Motts has lost his dog Beth. She wouldn’t have run away, so John thinks someone must have stolen her. Familiar faces suddenly turn into suspects, and John isn’t sure who to trust. His journey to find her brings him to the walrus, who always has sage advice. The walrus lives in a yard next to the neighborhood church, which is piled high with garbage bags filled with the walrus’s possessions. According to the walrus, one must constantly sort their possessions into the appropriate bags so that they know where to find everything, though one must take care not to use too few or too many bags. This advice, as metaphor or practicality, is lost on John, and so he ventures to the woods for answers—the woods which no one must ever enter—where he finds more than he could have expected.
This bizarre short tale was adapted by Gavin Fullerton from a novella by Patrick McHale, who is known for his equally bizarre series Over the Garden Wall. The story seems to take place in a past time—the kids play jacks on the sidewalk, the hairstyles are big, and there’s no digital technology to speak of. The colors are slightly muted and bleed past their outlines, invoking a newsprint-like aesthetic that contributes to a dated timeline.
John Motts is an odd character; always represented as grayscale in a colorful world, he is simplistically cartoonish compared to the people around him, with a large, egg-shaped head that is reminiscent of Bone or Jimmy Corrigan. He’s fairly single-minded, focused only on the task of finding his beloved dog. His behavior and his decision-making processes are slightly strange. For example, when he first notices his dog is missing, he thinks “I should tell the policeman who is my neighbor,” not “I should call 911 to report this to the police,” and he walks to the policeman’s house in order to do so. The whole story feels like a dreamscape that is slightly misaligned with reality; there seems to be an internal logic to the behavior of the characters, but it’s not something you can quite figure out as an outsider. This uncertainty creates a somewhat haunting tone to the story—anything can happen, and there’s nothing quite as frightening as the unknown. Much like a dream, it seems that the longer he spends searching, the more lost he finds himself.
Despite the haunting tone, the story is not particularly scary. This is partially due to John’s attitude—for all that happens to him, he seems to take it in stride, and never seems to be particularly scared. Even the most fearsome character is not drawn as particularly terrifying. Fullerton represents him as cartoonish, like John, and he seems more lonely than anything else. Even when he is enraged and threatening John, John’s reaction is that of anger rather than fear, which only serves to make his opponent sad. In another scene, John is pursued at gunpoint, but rather than worrying for his safety, he asks his aggressor if he has seen his dog.
BAGS (Or a Story Thereof) is a bizarre tale laced with the deep sadness of losing something dear to you. The original novella was released along with a soundtrack (available at somebooks.bandcamp.com) that makes for wonderfully haunting ambiance for this lonesome read.
BAGS (Or a Story Thereof)
By Patrick McHale
Art by Gavin Fullerton
ISBN: 9781684154098
Archaia, 2019
Publisher Age Rating: grade 3-4
NFNT Age Recommendation: Tween (10-13), Teen (13-16), Older Teen (16-18)
Pushing through the dark and tangled woods of upstate New York, a young woman emerges from the thicket into a surprisingly summery day, an expanse of green lawn, and the turreted structure of an imposing building. Some, having read nothing more than the previous sentence, will already suspect that this structure is Brakebills—university for magicians, setting of Lev Grossman’s bestselling novel The Magicians and the TV show of the same name—and they would be right. But while the novel and TV show feature Quentin Coldwater as their protagonist, this graphic novel is told from the point of view of Alice Quinn, prodigious magician and Quentin’s off-again-on-again love interest.
While The Magicians: Alice’s Story covers the same ground as Lev Grossman’s novel, some plot points are condensed and others added to effectively tell the tale from Alice’s perspective. As a reader who hadn’t read the novel nor viewed any of the TV show before reading The Magicians: Alice’s Story, I found the graphic novel perfectly comprehensible without prior knowledge. At the same time, the book never quite escapes the sense of being derived from something larger: whereas the novel bridges the transition between major plot points with a fluid abundance of words and small details, for instance, graphic novel writer Lilah Sturges often opts for “fast-forwarding” through years of time to hit the most significant moments.
Unfortunately, almost all of the moments deemed significant involve Quentin Coldwater and/or his rival Penny, both men. While the earlier parts of the graphic novel add nuance and even entire new plot points to Alice’s story, these dimensional additions fall off as the book progresses until the story boils down to a very limited range of emotions: Alice’s longing for Quentin and her feelings of being caught between Quentin and Penny. Alice is an intriguing person and talented magician mostly sidelined in Grossman’s novel as an object for Quentin to alternately ignore, yearn for, and rail against. It was disappointing to find that she wasn’t given much more room to breathe here, in the version of the story eponymously told from her own point of view.
Despite this drawback, the graphic novel has considerable strong points. While I haven’t yet watched the TV show, the graphic novel makes contributions to the visual telling of the Magicians story in its own right. Illustrator Pius Bak effectively imagines the characters and settings, and renders sometimes complex scenes of battle, magic, and travel through time and space in vibrant and coherent visuals. Close readers of the novel will find little details from the book sprinkled throughout the illustrations, a delightful treasure hunt. The coloring by Dan Jackson is rich, sparkling with iridescent golds and purples and otherworldly blues, and does a good job underlining the difference between the magical, non-magical, and otherworldly settings.
An engrossing accompaniment to The Magicians, Sturges’ graphic novel is unfortunate only in that it doesn’t imagine big enough, choosing to cleave close to the men-centric plot of the canon text rather than investigating the full range of what Alice Quinn might have thought, felt, and experienced throughout the course of her magical journey.
The Magicians: Alice’s Story
By Lilah Sturges
Art by Pius Bak
ISBN: 9781684150212
Archaia, 2019
NFNT Age Recommendation: Older Teen (16-18), Adult (18+)
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Creator Highlights: LGBTQIA+ Creator
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