Skip to main content

Review 23: Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening
Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in.

The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails.

That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part – they serve to ground you quickly, to help you figure out exactly what sort of world this is. Hint: it’s not Center Parcs.

One thing that’s immediately obvious is that this world is matriarchal. Almost every character in the book is a woman, barring a few non-descript guards and a couple of semi-major characters. It feels deeply refreshing to see women inhabiting a wide variety of roles within the story – villains, heroes, wrestlers, children, gods.

And these characters are filled with nuance. Our hero, Maika Halfwolf (which would win an award for ‘the most fantasy novel name ever devised’, but you quickly forgive it) isn’t a simple hero. She is impulsive, selfish and angry as well as driven, powerful and brave. This applies across the board – there are no moral black-and-whites here. Everything is on an ethical grayscale.

Takeda’s artwork is stellar, beautifully rendered, and drawn from both Eastern and Western influences to match the similarly-inspired dual sources of storytelling that Liu draws from. The detail is vivid and palpable. Her attention to focus is brilliant too – in frames with so much detail in can sometimes be different to know where to put your attention, but that’s never a problem in this.

This feels like the beginning of a much longer story, as you’d expect from a genre where a standalone novel is considered the outlandish freak cousin of the family. I’m definitely going to be following it.

--

This is my twenty-third book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 40: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders

Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut , I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book? Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly. Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily over...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 46: The Problem that Has No Name by Betty Friedan

It's odd when people hark back to the 1950s as a golden time, as though everything today were on an ever-descending spiral into depression, violence and selfie sticks. You may notice that those who are on a hark-hop tend to be white, straight, male, or any combination thereof. This is probably because to be a white, straight man in 1950s America was to have an absolutely corking time, relatively speaking. It’s a bit like watching Darth Vader bemoan the fact that, since the Death Star got blown to bits, there are too many ewoks about and the rebel alliance has no respect for you anymore. The process of losing dominance is painful for the dominant class. Don’t worry, though, straight white men! There’s still a hell of a way to go before we reach equality, so you can keep living it up right now. Anyway, Betty Friedan’s The Problem That Has No Name is a lucid and powerful selection of essays from her larger The Feminine Mystique , the seminal feminist text that underlines the probl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 37: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has got dystopian speculative fiction down . She probably gets up in the morning and chomps on a huge bowl of Dystopios, washed down with a hot cup of speculation. In fact, she's got it so down that in The Heart Goes Last , one of her more recent offerings, the premise feels almost throwaway. It's not that it's not fully-considered, or incomplete - Atwood's world-building is as jam-hot as it ever was. It's more that it feels like she can slot it together with such ease that shocking elements don't even shock her anymore. There's real darkness in this story, but the tone across the book is much lighter than on some of her other works, and that can serve to jar a little. The premise is that society has crumbled (natch) and an authoritarian new semi-socialist system has arisen to combat the cultural rot ( mais oui ). In this, people spend half their lives voluntarily in prison (A.K.A. Positron), and the other half out of it (in Consi...
Post a Comment
Read more