Take a photo of a barcode or cover
chronicallybookish 's review for:
Layers
by Pénélope Bagieu
I… don’t know how to review this book.
To start, the ARC I received was missing about 10-20% of the pages. Half of the stories were incomplete. Or at least, I think that’s the case? Every handful of pages, there would be 2-3 blank pages. Maybe that was purposeful and was separating complete stories? The stories didn’t seem complete, so I’m not sure.
I read what was… confusing and seemed to have no through-thread, nothing tying it together.
This was a connection of short anecdotes of Penelope Bagieu’s life told in graphic novel format. I’ve enjoyed many a graphic novel memoir, but the whole time I was reading this I just kept thinking… what is the point? There was nothing special about any of these stories. They were pedestrian, typical, and had no real overarching story to tell.
My last complaint is the fact that this is YA. Why is this YA? In the majority of these stories Penelope is in her early—if not mid—20s. There are a couple stories of teenagerhood, a couple stories of young childhood, but it is overwhelmingly the stories of an adult woman. The stories themselves aren’t relatable to a general teenage audience, they deal with topics and themes and experiences that are still many years in the future for a 13, 15, even 17 year old. There were also illustrations of people having sex. Multiple of them, and said people were not obscured by blankets or anything. Cartoon or not, that was not something I expected in a novel supposedly for minors. The book is a translated work that was originally French, so that’s probably why, but it was still odd to me, especially because for every reason this book just makes no sense in the YA market.
To start, the ARC I received was missing about 10-20% of the pages. Half of the stories were incomplete. Or at least, I think that’s the case? Every handful of pages, there would be 2-3 blank pages. Maybe that was purposeful and was separating complete stories? The stories didn’t seem complete, so I’m not sure.
I read what was… confusing and seemed to have no through-thread, nothing tying it together.
This was a connection of short anecdotes of Penelope Bagieu’s life told in graphic novel format. I’ve enjoyed many a graphic novel memoir, but the whole time I was reading this I just kept thinking… what is the point? There was nothing special about any of these stories. They were pedestrian, typical, and had no real overarching story to tell.
My last complaint is the fact that this is YA. Why is this YA? In the majority of these stories Penelope is in her early—if not mid—20s. There are a couple stories of teenagerhood, a couple stories of young childhood, but it is overwhelmingly the stories of an adult woman. The stories themselves aren’t relatable to a general teenage audience, they deal with topics and themes and experiences that are still many years in the future for a 13, 15, even 17 year old. There were also illustrations of people having sex. Multiple of them, and said people were not obscured by blankets or anything. Cartoon or not, that was not something I expected in a novel supposedly for minors. The book is a translated work that was originally French, so that’s probably why, but it was still odd to me, especially because for every reason this book just makes no sense in the YA market.