I've only seen a few graphic novels from Kids Can Press, and so far they've all been pretty fun - we all know how much we LOVED Binky! Yay Binky sequel! I'm pleased and delighted to find another excellent series being produced by KCP, and it's just as much fun as Binky!From the moment the reader looks at the first page, she is plunged into an exciting adventure and mysteries galore in a medievalish fantasy world. First, we meet Dessa, an orphaned girl who works as an acrobat in a traveling circus - really just a disguise for a group of thieves, including her friends, a gray, goblin-like creature named Topper and the huge, friendly, but not very bright Fisk. We later learn that Topper is a Norker and Fisk is an Ettin (a one-headed Ettin at that!)
After a series of misfortunes, Dessa decides to join Norker and Fisk in an attemp to rob the selfish and greedy queen's treasury. A bad decision, since they're all caught, put in the power of the mysterious and cruel Master Greyfalcon, and condemned to death despite the best efforts of the captain of the Queen's Dragons.
Do they escape? Will Dessa find her lost brother? What is the mystery behind Dessa's dead family? Who - or what - is Master Greyfalcon? Are there more strange creatures in Dessa's land? What is the queen hiding? You'll have to read this action-packed story to answer a few of these questions...and then wait on tenterhooks with me for a sequel! Lots of sequels!
The art is colorful and vivid, the text easily readable, the adventure suitably exciting, and the mysteries very mysterious!
I checked this out from a neighboring library and was busy poking at my juvenile graphic novel budget to try to fit it in when to my squealing delight a review copy arrived from Kids Can Press! I added it right away and the kids have pounced on it - it's already been out twice in only two weeks, not counting all the kids who pulled it off the shelf and sat down on the floor right there to read it!
Verdict: Want! You want this one too, definitely. Put it in your juvenile graphic novel collection right away! You don't have one? Sneak it in your fiction, it's a nicely bound hardback.
ISBN: 978-1554534142; Published August 2010 by Kids Can Press; Review copy provided by the publisher through Raab Associates
2 comments:
Jennifer, I am getting SO into the growing crop of graphic novels for kids--thanks for recommending this one!
It's a must have! One of the things, from a librarian perspective, I love about KCP's gns is their bindings are real book bindings - they don't fall apart when you breathe on them (I'm looking at YOU Dark Horse)
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