Oh. . . wow. I don't know what other words to use for this book. No, for this conclusion to the trilogy. It was phenomenal. If I had thought the last book went places? Well, I was wholly unprepared for this one. The storytelling was beautiful and evocative and powerful and. . .

Just left me feeling such a variety of emotions as I concluded this journey alongside Binti. I laughed, I cried, I raged, I celebrated alongside her and Okwu. And then there's Mwinyi who. . . I have no words. I don't often get into the whole book boyfriend thing some readers do, but he's definitely a character who makes me understand why they do.

Once again, the narration for this was top notch. I am always left reeling by how much more powerful the emotions are in this series cause of the talented Robin Miles. I definitely have to check out more of their work. These books deal with some difficult, deep emotions given all of what Binti goes through yet the delivery is always excellent. Quality work.

All I can say now is that I am excited beyond words for this series to be adapted and hope, hope, hope Hulu does the adaptation the justice it deserves and more. And that, of course, I will definitely be checking out more work by Nnedi Okorafor who I think might now be an auto-buy author for me.

Beautiful in every word and line. . . K. O’Neill always delivers. Once again I picked up a work by them and wasn’t left disappointed. This story was moving and lovely. The disability rep in it made me smile as it was handled well and I’m coming to realize that this is just a talent of the author. The imagery in this was exceptional. Just captivating. I can’t wait to put a physical copy of it on my shelf soon.

I had been looking at this graphic novel for awhile. The cover was always just so captivating it always drew my eye when popping up in recommendations, but I couldn’t get ahold of it at my library. Then I managed to get ahold of it this much just in time for a very important readathon - it is called Asian Readathon and is ran by Cindy (withcindy on YouTube); definitely check it out - and I’m so happy I was reminded of this book in time cause it is so, so good. Even made me cry a bit.

The art is stunning, and the way the stories of the mother and son are told through a mixture of their real world experience combined with the messages of fairytales is brilliant. I especially loved the information given by the author, Trung Le Nguyen, after the acknowledgements on his inspiration for both this important story he was telling as well as the comparison of graphic novels to a hybrid language.

I will give a warning though that as this is also a story about an LGQBTIA+ kid struggling with his identity in the 90s that there is a brief reference to the horrible, tragic murder of Matthew Shephard which was a big topic in the media at that time in regards to hate crimes and definitely relevant to the fears of coming out. There is also in regards to the immigration part of the story as far as mentions of loss of a parent & re-education(there might be some others I missed). I wanted anyone going into this graphic novel to be as informed as possible in case they aren’t able to handle it or need preparation to be able to do so.

Even so, I still think this is a beautiful story worth reading and highly recommend it.