Hilda Hilda and the TrollHilda and the Midnight GiantHilda and the Bird ParadeHilda and the Black HoundLuke Pearson2/2019I'd been aware of these books, but never checked them out. Then Netflix made them into an animated series and it was so good. So i bought the first four books. |
Blue is the Warmest Color Julie Maroh2/2019Charlie and his friends gave me this book as thanks for putting them up at my house for a ski weekend. It's sad and powerful—about a 15-year-old girl in France who falls in love with a college-aged woman and discovers her sexuality. Well-drawn, well-colored, well-told. It was made into a movie that i haven't seen. |
Nuclear Winter Volume TwoCab2/2019These books are slim, but full of fun and great drawing. |
Hilo Then Everything Went WrongJudd Winick2/2019Things are getting a little more serious in the latest Hilo installment, but the story is still compelling and the characters are fun and real, even though a few of them are robots. I wish these came out more frequently than one per year! |
Nightlights Lorena Alvarez5/2019I wanted this book to be better than it was. The drawings and imagery were great, and the plot, although similar to Vera Brosgol's Anya's Ghost, had a lot of potential, but it just wasn't fleshed out as well as it could have been. The explanations for the main character's "nightlights" were hazy and incomplete, and the story bumped along a little too quickly. Still, gorgeous artwork. |
Hilda and the Stone Forest Luke Pearson6/2019The plot is full of adventure, but i can also just lose myself in the incredible drawings on every page. This one ends with a cliff-hanger though, so it'll be a while until the story concludes! |
Winnie-the-Pooh A. A. Milne6/2019I've been familiar with Winnie-the-Pooh for most of my life, and i'd read bits and pieces, but never the whole original text. This was a book given to my father for Christmas in 1930 from his Aunt Mildred. It's missing one page. I was surprised at how slightly crafty and borderline subversive the early stories were. The first is told as if it's being read aloud to the real-life Christopher Robin, but the later stories become more stand-alone. Still, there's some word-play in the text that for the time must have been quite amusing in a sly, silly way. I never knew that Tigger is not a part of these stories, but appeared in the sequel The House at Pooh Corner. |
Illegal Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, Giovanni Rigano6/2019A harrowing tale of two brothers striving to get from central Africa, across the Sahara Desert, across the Mediterranean Sea, to Europe. Poignant, stirring, masterfully done. And the artwork, especially the night scenes, is stunningly beautiful. Get it. Savor it. Learn from it. |
New Kid Jerry Craft6/2019The drawing on this graphic novel was clean and bright, but the story was a bit thin and the dialog was, at times, fairly forced. There was some nice graphic references to movies in the chapter titles, but the text balloons throughout the book were too big for their content, sometimes to the point of distraction. What bugged me the most, however, was the way the story bludgeoned the reader with "white people can't tell black people apart" and "white culture and black culture are different." Those points were made over and over again throughout the book and i was hoping that, by the end, there'd be some great enlightenment, but no, the story just petered out. Plus, the main character, Jordan, is only a "new kid" for the first couple chapters, then he starts to fit in. Another gripe: There are a bare minimum of female characters and they come and go out of the story in a few panels, while the main five or six characters are all boys. I don't have any idea what it's like to be a black kid in a mostly-white school, but this narrative just seems forced. |
Pashmina Nidhi Chanani8/2019A nice story, beautifully drawn, about finding belonging in an unfamiliar country as well as learning about the lead character's family history and how she fits into it. It is grounded in reality with a splash of magic that brings the pages to colorful life. |
Mighty Jack and Zita the Spacegirl Ben Hatke9/2019Oh i love these characters and all of Ben Hatke's stories. In this one, Zita and Jack and their friends team up to save the world from Giants. If you haven't read any of the three Zita The Spacegirl books or the two Mighty Jack books, do yourself a favor and sit down with one or all of them. I won a free advanced copy of this book a couple months before it was released, but it was all in grayscale so i held firm and didn't read it until i got the full color version. |
Stargazing Jen Wang9/2019This book wasn't as good as Jen Wang's last book, The Prince and the Dressmaker, but it's a sweet story of awkwardness and friendship tinged with sorry and hope. The drawing is crisp and conveys so much emotion without a single word. |
Nuclear Winter Volume ThreeCab10/2019The final volume of this series is once again lively and engagingly drawn, plus there's a little more heft to this book. It wraps up the slice-of-life (in perpetual snow) nicely and with hope. |
The Midwinter Witch Molly Knox Ostertag11/2019The final book in this trilogy. It’s just as enchanting and beautifully drawn as the first two. I accept that this story is done, but i would not be at all sad if Ms. Ostertag decided to revisit these characters in the future. |
Pumpkinheads Rainbow Rowell11/2019This wasn't much of a story—it seemed pretty obvious how it would end, although i read it with the hope of something different. And the artwork, though crisp and colorful, got to be repetitive, with not much change of scenery or characters. Final complaint: some of the chapters had nice little arcs over a dozen pages, others were two or three pages and seemed like they could've been incorporated into another chapter. So i'm not saying this book was bad, but it certainly didn't push any boundaries. |
Guts Raina Telgemeier12/2019Thoughtful and personal, slightly young-reader-ish, but a nice slice of Raina's 11-year-old life and her fears and phobias. |
