Foiled by Jane Yolen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This graphic novel is about a high school girl who is an avid fencer. She feels she doesn’t fit in socially, but focuses on her sport and spending time with her cousin. Things begin to change for her when her mother finds her a new practice fencing foil at a yard sale, a new, cute boy becomes her lab partner at school, and she begins to see color even though she has always been colorblind.
I enjoyed the strong female character and the supernatural elements, but the narrative style was a little different. It had a lot of exposition and flashback that explained how the girl ended up at the point in the book where the actions starts. Unfortunately, the real action is over very quickly after that.
I also disliked how this book alluded to a deeper story that could be uncovered in a later book, but wrapped things up in a way that I wasn’t sure one was going to be published. The odd thing is that if this was a movie, a good director would make all the pacing and flashbacks work well and the book would be a decent first chunk of a movie. I enjoyed a lot of how the artwork was drawn dynamically from interesting points of view, but it could have worked even better in a larger format.
I liked this book, but didn’t love it. I could see it growing on me if further volumes were released to continue the story.
- posted 16 hours ago
