Saturday, March 29, 2008

Book Review: The Arrival


This book I read in an hour, but it's my nominee for best book read so far this year. It's a graphic novel, without words, about immigration in a world that really is unlike anything you've seen. I know, a lot of things say that, but this truly delivers. I don't want to give too much away about how the author does it, because half of the fun is the discovery, but I will say this is the Perfect Graphic Novel: the story literally cannot be told any other way than in this format. In a book like this, I expect imagination, but another aspect that surprised me is the subtle emotion captured in the characters' faces at certain points. The first example is a sad goodbye near the beginning: look at the faces and you can feel all the nuances of a painful but necessary departure.
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The only drawback to this book is you do read it so fast that you may be left wondering why you paid 15 bucks for it, but that's what libraries are for and it's how I got my copy. I'm just sad that I had to give it back this morning. I think I kept it for the full three weeks just because I liked it so much (plus I wanted to wait for Laurie to have time to read it too!). (Oh yeah, Laurie liked it, too.)
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