The artist’s use of color is especially striking: His battle scenes are ample, bloodily scarlet affairs, and Polyphemus’s cave is a stifling orange he depicts the underworld as a colorless, mirthless void, domestic spaces in warm tans, the all-encircling sea in a light Mediterranean blue and some of the far-away islands in almost tangibly growing greens.
Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre ( King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic. Well-paced and thrilling readers will fly high with Raven’s tale. The diverse cast is indicated through names and variations in skin tone. Picolo’s ( Icarus and the Sun, 2018, etc.) ghostly images of girls and women from different eras erupting from their graves to surround and support their earthbound sisters elicit good chills. In one notable scene, the spirits of dead “mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers, voodoo queens and warrior women of O’rleans” are called forward to gather and vanquish evil alongside Raven. The respectful but not extremely nuanced inclusion of matriarchal African heritage religions such as voodoo is more empowering than campy. The muted palette pairs perfectly with the noir tone of Raven’s search for her origins. A compelling storyline pulls readers into Raven’s turmoil, guiding them competently through the floating panels of expressive artwork. While she cannot remember anything from before the accident, she suffers continual nightmares featuring a multieyed spirit. She also contends with other people’s emotions invading her mind and the tricky tendency for her own mean thoughts to manifest into reality. Raven searches for clues to her past while navigating conventional teenage social problems: a mean girl and a cute boy. Raven now lives with her late mother’s sister, a voodoo priestess and “the Mother of Souls,” and her daughter. Seventeen-year-old high school senior Raven rebuilds her life in New Orleans after a car accident takes away everything she knows.
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