Gentle Readers who follow the Book Reports may have picked up on the fact that I’m keen on Shannon Hale’s books. I had read all six of her published books, when she got out ahead of me by getting Rapunzel’s Revenge out in collaboration with her husband (Dean Hale) and an artist (Nathan Hale). Because it’s a graphic novel.
Your Humble Blogger likes graphic novels, you know, in theory. And I like some of them in actual fact. But I don’t seek them out, and my response to the news that Shannon Hale had (co-)written a graphic novel was, well, I suppose I’ll check it out. It was clear from the early publicity and cover shots and things that it was the Rapunzel story, more or less, as a Western/Superhero thing, and the sub-sub-genre of rewritten-fairy-tales is starting to feel a trifle played-out to me. I was planning on reading it, as I say, but I wasn’t all worked up about it.
So, there is was, one day, in the New Books area of the Teen Room at the public library, all displayed with the cover forward, and it went into my satchel and came home, and then it kinda sat around for a few days, and then I read the first few pages, and then it sat around for a few more days, and then I finally got into it and finished it. And then I gave it back to the library, and I suspect I won’t bother reading it again.
It’s good. Really, it’s clever, and well-written, and well-drawn, and there are bits that are really very imaginative and wonderful, and I really liked the ending. But somehow, it didn’t altogether work for me. I don’t know why, and I certainly don’t know what might have made it work for me. I suspect that there are Gentle Readers for whom it would work very well indeed, and maybe some of y’all are right now thinking what’s the matter with this loser? But that’s how it is.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.