I was anticipating Ru Xu’s EndGames, the sequel to NewsPrints, because I enjoyed the previous book, a steampunk-y tale of the first girl newsboy in a world at war. Unfortunately, EndGames was almost exactly what I didn’t want to read. I missed the individual character work with Blue and Crow, the AI built to fly warplanes. Instead, it’s a story of two countries at war and the machinations involved with empire-building and hereditary royalty. Given that the two lands are […]

Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Witch Boy was a wonderfully fresh take on the idea of being raised by a family of magic users. Aster learned to be a witch even though boys were supposed to be shape-shifters, and that breaking of gender-determined roles made the story modern and relatable. I liked the sequel, The Hidden Witch, even better. Now that the background and characters have been established, Ostertag has more space for story, and this one touches on some deep […]

Kristen Gudsnuk’s Making Friends freshens up the idea of “kid gets magic way to make life changes, learns what true friendship is” with a layer of magical-girl media influences. Danielle is struggling with being separated from her friends now that she’s in seventh grade. Feeling lonely, she draws a picture of Prince Neptune (the evil-but-cool villain on the Solar Sisters cartoon she watches) in Great-Aunt Elma’s notebook, only for him to appear! He’s still got his magical powers, but more […]

Molly Knox Ostertag presents a timely tale in a fantasy setting. She previously illustrated Shattered Warrior, but I believe this is her first long-form work both writing and drawing. The Witch Boy shows us how the teenage Aster doesn’t fit in. In his family of magicians, girls are witches and boys are shapeshifters who fight demons — and you can tell from the title the struggle Aster faces. He wants to do magic, and he doesn’t have the signs of […]

Raina Telgemeier set a high bar when she adapted four Baby-Sitters Club books into graphic novels between 2006 and 2008. The books have refreshed Ann M. Martin’s stories for a new generation, particularly once they were reissued in color. So it’s no surprise that the publisher wanted to extend the series with a new creator. Gale Galligan worked with Telgemeier on her original graphic novel Drama, but what most readers of this fifth Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, Dawn and the […]

Swing It, Sunny is the sequel to Sunny Side Up, a powerful children’s graphic novel about coping with family changes. That book had Sunny visiting her grandfather in Florida and learning about the problems her older brother Dale struggles with. This one deals with the followup — Sunny is back home, trying to go about everyday life while Dale’s absence continually warps the family structure. He’s been sent to a military boarding school, which he resents, so even when he […]

Time Shifters by Chris Grine could have been a lot of fun, but there’s a disturbing mismatch in tone between the opening and the majority of the content that overshadowed the rest of the book for me. Spoilers follow for the first twenty pages of the graphic novel. Luke and his older brother Kyle head through the woods to a pond. They’re confronted by bigger bullies, and the result, after Kyle tries to protect his brother, is tragic. There’s an […]

Out at the end of this month is an exciting debut graphic novel by Ru Xu. NewsPrints stars an ingenious newsboy in a steampunk coming-of-age story with a modern take on gender. It’s wartime in Nautilene, and Blue, on the run from rival newsboys, has stumbled into a secret lab inhabited by an absent-minded inventor. Blue’s part of a patchwork family held together by the mayor, who also runs the paper. The inventor takes on the irrepressible orphan as an […]