I liked it for the most part. The artwork is serviceable. I thought the teen drama/angst was handled very well. Not sure how Tiffany took (almost) being choked out relatively normal though. Tiffany is emotional and irrational. Her boyfriend wants her to be a secret lover, her parents are divorced, and everything just seems 100 times worse. Oh yeah, she also has to live in the basement when a new tenant arrives. *wink wink* ( )

A very brief graphic novel about life and death and finding satisfaction within yourself and your heritage. Lovely, but far too short for me to really identify with and feel for the characters.

(Provided by publisher) ( )

I received this arc from the publisher for an honest review.

Pierre L'Errant is a vampire and was an Anishinabe man, he has come home, back to the Otter Lake Reserve after an absence of some 300 years. Tiffany Hunter is an Ojibway teen, and has spent her entire sixteen years of life living in the Otter Lake Reserve. It is inevitable that their paths will cross, not least because Pierre has chosen to lodge with the Hunter family for the duration of his stay.

The native American Hunter family has experienced a relatively recent upheaval with Tiffany's mother having abandoned the family the year before, leaving her living with her father and grandmother. Tiffany's mother left the reservation with a white boyfriend and Tiffany's new boyfriend Tony is white and whilst he does not come out and say it plainly, we are led to assume that this is behind her father's antipathy towards Tony, result more grief for Tiffany.

Tiffany is a native American and lives on a reservation, but aside from that I did not see what made her so particularly extra-special. She appears to be a typical teenager, going through a typical teenage phase. Pierre does a of of moping and lurking about, visits a few old haunts, terrifies the locals and tells a tale or two.

Pierre was a bored teenager and longed to go and explore the wider world, and off he went, Tiffany is a bored, angry teenager and naturally assumes the grass is greener elsewhere.

This is a novel in which the graphics are either black, white or red, chosen to enhance rather than detract from the story, however, whilst I have no complaints about the technique used internally, I found the cover art a little basic. It did not immediately appeal to me as a book I would want to read.

I felt that the use of flashback was extremely effective to tell Pierre's story of how he came to leave the village, this aspect of the story was engaging but much too short.

The original novel is apparently 215 pages long, so it is plainly obvious that a great deal of information was not transferred over to this graphic novel.

I do not know how the original play or the novel addresses the character of an adult Pierre, but aside from an incident on a baseball field, I thought much more could have been added. Apart from being moody, old and liking blood who was Pierre? Apart from being moody, angry and ditching her friends for her boyfriend who was Tiffany?

Engaging, but empty and over too soon.


Urthwild ( )

The Story
I have to wonder if the novel is a bit better, and if perhaps it should have been left in that format. As it is, the story seems kind of... aimless. About a teenage girl on a reservation with her father and grandmother, dealing with the hardships of life, and then what seems like a really random addition of the supernatural, with the old Native vampire. Nothing about the story was bad, the [human] characters all came off very real, with problems many families deal with. But, presumably due to the condensed format, it just seemed like two stories laid one on top of the other, neither of which really went anywhere. I think it would have been better had it been longer with a bit more plot.

The Art
Done in just black, white, and the occasional red highlight, it seems surprising just how much life is there on the pages. Every panel, while not overly detailed, manages to tell its own story in miniature. The raw emotion captured on the faces of Tiffany and her father and grandmother, the anger, sadness, excitement, confusion, they're all easily readable in the faces and postures. The wisps of steam coming from the kettle as grandmother makes tea, the clouds of dust behind the car that pulls into an empty lot, the red drips of blood down a hand pricked by a nail, everything is perfectly done to have the maximum impact from minor detail.

Overall
I enjoyed looking at the art more than reading the story, but I think with less removed from the original, this could be a notable piece of work. ( )

Tiffany's family life is complicated--her mother left the family, leaving her with her father and her grandmother on an Anishinaabe reservation in Canada. Her white boyfriend Tony has some doubts about dating a girl from the reservation, and to top it all off, she's being asked to give up her room for a boarder. Pierre L'Errant is visiting the region after a long time away--a very, very long time. When Tiffany reaches a breaking point, he's the only one who can find her and maybe convince her not to throw her life away.

This is a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by the same author. The art doesn't really do a lot to add to the story, although the addition of red accents in the black-and-white pages is a good touch. The short length means that the story is relatively shallow, without a lot of time to get into characterization. Recommended for vampire fans; hardcore graphic novel readers might be disappointed at the quality of the art, however. ( )