Graphic novels: ...Willowweep Manor, Garrity; Beautiful Darkness, Vehlmann; The Magic Fish, Nguyen

[juushika]

Title: The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor
Author: Shaenon K. Garrity
Illustrator: Christopher J. Baldwin
Published: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2021
Rating: 1.5 of 5
Page Count: 225
Total Page Count: 385,470
Text Number: 1449
Read Because: mentioned by osprey_archer, paperback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: 1.5 stars, rounded up. Gothic novel as portal world/parallel universe is a fun concept and the bones of this are likeable—the characters, particularly the protagonist; the way it engages genre. But rendering a big concept in a standalone volume means sacrificing depth. I wish the art reintroduced that missing depth (and those gear illustrations almost do!) except that it's ... pretty bad, actually. Nice try, but not recommended.


Title: Beautiful Darkness
Author: Fabien Vehlmann
Illustrator: Kerascoët
Translator: Helge Dascher
Published: Drawn and Quarterly, 2014 (2009)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 95
Total Page Count: 385,895
Text Number: 1451
Read Because: hardback found in my library discards and I certainly seemed relevant to my interests!
Review: In the lee of a dead girl, little dolls/spirits/embodied fragments of her consciousness eke out a living. I like the vibes of very much—as it says on the tin, it's whimsical and morbid, cute and cruel, and reminds me of the gothic/creepy kawaii subgenres. But I kept waiting for the plot to amount to something, and it doesn't: there's episodic glimpses of their lives, a more plotty and character-focused climax, but no real insight or parallels drawn between the dead girl and these little creatures. Fine to browse, but more memorable in tone than in what it says.


Title: The Magic Fish
Author: Trung Le Nguyen
Published: Random House Graphic
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 387,610
Text Number: 1454
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund & Kalanadi, paperback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library in my big borrowing-spree before mask restrictions were lifted and I stopped using the physical library again [sadface]
Review: Graphic novels are experimental, short, and emotionally evocative—a natural format for queer stories. But those same strengths can be weaknesses: so much hinges on art style, and condensing what's effectively an Issue Novel into this length can make it scattered, or talky, or trite. So I love how this approaches the problem of simplifying a queer immigrant story, layering the real-world narrative with fairytales which first symbolize and then complicate the archetypes, arcs, and other shorthands that make legible the complexity of the subject matter. And it helps a lot that the art is lovely, consistent and detailed ink illustrations with simple but effective color-coding. This isn't perfect—it's a little too neat; maybe (dare I say) there's too much of the fairy tales (or, at least, I wish more were like the Cinderella retelling, mutable and tied to real-world dialog/narrative). But I really liked it.

Comments

[minutia_r]

I had already heard good things about The Magic Fish, and the fact that you liked it so much is really tempting me to pick it up sooner rather than later.

[juushika]

I hope you like it when you get to it! Multiple people in my reading-related-internet-space have, so it seems like a solid bet. It's definitely one of the better of its kind that I've encountered, and I really liked the art.