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 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe
2 comments
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem.
1 comment
Read more