davramlocke's Reviews (777)

Probably taking the place as my new favorite graphic novel, a prize previously held by Bechdel's Fun Home. Both stories are great, but I feel like the artwork and color schemes in Asterios Polyp set it above Bechdel's biography. It tells a fictional story, but one every bit as heartfelt and meaningful as what you'll find in reality.

Not only is the story and artwork beautiful, but the book itself is a treasure. Just all around amazing.

Fans of Sherlock will appreciate this Graphic novel, even though the premise of talking animals is hard to accept outside of childhood.

Starts out slow, and I actually didn't think it would be very good, but by the end I was fairly engaged in the tale, and learned quite a bit about the last hundred years in China and about Chinese family life. There are problems with the story, most notably the parts about Yangs stalker, but those are a minority.

This was a very slow burn for me, but I ended up finishing the last half of the book in one, sporadically interrupted, reading session because it really comes into its own in the back half. By the end, I was completely engrossed and the ending itself is one of the strangest ways I've ever seen a mystery end.

A dark but delightful book, and Nelly is one of the best characters I've read about in a very long time. I can't say there's much to be learnt from the pages of The Death of Bees, as it's mostly a story about sadness and death, but that doesn't make it any less of a joy to read.

I'm somewhat torn on how to rate this book. It kind of defies a rating. It's beautifully written, and intensely interesting to read, but it lacks a cohesion, the kind I would expect of a "story." I can certainly say it's the best zombie book I've ever read, unless one counts The Walking Dead, which I believe is a better tale told. I feel like Colson Whitehead telling Kirkman's story would be something close to perfection in a genre novel. Whitehead's the better writer, but Kirkman's the better storyteller.

This is one of the oddest books I've ever read. It's chock full of symbolic imagery, the majority of it being sexual in some way (and the majority of that being somehow involved with female sexuality). The story, at the center, is just about teenage kids falling in love and being in pain, etc. The kind of stuff thousands of books have been written about. But there's this weird STD involved that deforms the people who get it into monsters and all this vaguely chthonic artwork that's really interesting. Anyone disturbed by horror movies might be better served avoiding this because some of the illustrations are vivid to the point of nauseating, but the book is really good and worth taking the risk.