Scan barcode
Reviews
The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass. 1892 by Rick Geary
quinnster's review against another edition
3.0
This review is for 4 of Rick Geary's Victorian Murder Books: The Borden Tragedy, The Case of Madeleine Smith, The Beast of Chicago, and The Saga of the Bloody Benders.
Dry, fact-based accounts of some of the more notorious murderers in history. They read almost like textbooks. There is no creative license taken in any of these. While interesting, some get downright boring. The Bloody Benders was spent going on a history lesson of Kansas and of the guesstimations of where the Benders might have relocated. Very little was spent on the family itself because it seems very little is known of the family, which begs the questions why include them in this series?
I found The Borden Tragedy most interesting because out of the four I read it had the markings of a true whodunit. By all accounts it would seem that Lizzie Borden was innocent. So who then, murdered her father and step-mother?
Madeleine Smith was also an intriguing because it seemed only she could be the culprit and if so she got away with murder to live a long and fulfilling life.
The Beast of Chicago was impressive mostly in how H. H. Holmes's trail of back and forth travels was kept straight!
If you're looking for no nonsense reads on murderers these are your books. If you're hoping for some entertaining read I might try elsewhere.
Dry, fact-based accounts of some of the more notorious murderers in history. They read almost like textbooks. There is no creative license taken in any of these. While interesting, some get downright boring. The Bloody Benders was spent going on a history lesson of Kansas and of the guesstimations of where the Benders might have relocated. Very little was spent on the family itself because it seems very little is known of the family, which begs the questions why include them in this series?
I found The Borden Tragedy most interesting because out of the four I read it had the markings of a true whodunit. By all accounts it would seem that Lizzie Borden was innocent. So who then, murdered her father and step-mother?
Madeleine Smith was also an intriguing because it seemed only she could be the culprit and if so she got away with murder to live a long and fulfilling life.
The Beast of Chicago was impressive mostly in how H. H. Holmes's trail of back and forth travels was kept straight!
If you're looking for no nonsense reads on murderers these are your books. If you're hoping for some entertaining read I might try elsewhere.
jaymesnoyce's review against another edition
4.0
Lizzie Borden's family drama is brought to the comic panel in this classic graphic novel. A personal favorite from my childhood.
exorcismemily's review
4.0
This was a good retelling of the Borden story. It means a bit toward Lizzie being the murderer, but the door is still left open for other options. I wish the art would have been colored in, but it's still easy enough to read unlike some other black & white graphic novels I've tried. I'm going to read the rest of Geary's true crime graphic novels; it's a very interesting medium.
kt15's review
5.0
I truly enjoyed this book! The illustrations are great! The way the story is told is engaging and easy to follow! Definitely a great read for this spooky season.
museoffire's review
3.0
This was an interesting little read. I'm not sure the graphic format is the first thing I'd think of as a way to tell some of the darkest, and most famous true crime stories in our history but Rick Geary might just be onto something if he could just trust his source material and perhaps work on his figure drawing just a tad.
We all know the rhyme;
Lizzie Border took an axe
and gave her mother forty wacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden has gone down as one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in American history. It was a quiet morning in Fall River, Massachusetts when Abby and Andrew Borden were horrifically murdered by someone weilding an ax. It was Lizzie herself who discovered her father lying dead in his study on the couch she had previously helped him settle on when he returned from some business. Shortly after discovering him authorities discovered Lizzie's stepmother Abby also dead from a variety of brutal axe wounds in an upstairs bedroom.
Lizzie's subsequent arrest and trial were the sensation of the nation and though she was eventually acquitted of all charges history has not exactly been kind to her. While many felt there was indeed too much reasonable doubt to convict her the authorities were also never able to identify another suspect with the opportunity, motive or means of committing the murders.
Rick Geary chooses to tell his story with simplistic (sometimes overly) black and white drawings that sort of suggest MAD magazine cartoons. There's an unfinished quality to things as though he decided to publish early sketches rather then finished drawings. He also tries an understandable device of having a distant friend of Lizzie's narrate the story as though she's personally investigating what really happened. I get it, its meant to give a more personal touch to the narrative. It doesn't work primarily because we know nothing about this woman and Geary himself seems to sort of forget she's supposed to be telling the story. I would have been perfectly happy with just a straight retelling of the story without a mary sue being shoehorned in.
I definitely learned some interesting little tidbits about a case that is, if nothing else, very intriguing. Lizzie and her family lived a very complicated and combative life and had she been born in another time she would have benefitted greatly from some kind of therapeutic intervention and perhaps a career to use her many (repressed) talents and energy. Instead she lived a life of stifling propriety with a father too cheap and autocratic to give his daughters the opportunity of at least a pleasurable life despite a vast fortune that could have made them all comfortable and happy.
Is it possible that Lizzie simply lost it? Stifled for too long under her father's endless rules and restrictions and increasingly wrathful over his clear intentions to give much of her inheritence to his new wife's family? Yes it is. But its equally possible that she was simply the most convenient person to lay the blame on for a group of investigators who did a shoddy job at best and simply had to arrest someone.
I guess we'll never know....
We all know the rhyme;
Lizzie Border took an axe
and gave her mother forty wacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden has gone down as one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in American history. It was a quiet morning in Fall River, Massachusetts when Abby and Andrew Borden were horrifically murdered by someone weilding an ax. It was Lizzie herself who discovered her father lying dead in his study on the couch she had previously helped him settle on when he returned from some business. Shortly after discovering him authorities discovered Lizzie's stepmother Abby also dead from a variety of brutal axe wounds in an upstairs bedroom.
Lizzie's subsequent arrest and trial were the sensation of the nation and though she was eventually acquitted of all charges history has not exactly been kind to her. While many felt there was indeed too much reasonable doubt to convict her the authorities were also never able to identify another suspect with the opportunity, motive or means of committing the murders.
Rick Geary chooses to tell his story with simplistic (sometimes overly) black and white drawings that sort of suggest MAD magazine cartoons. There's an unfinished quality to things as though he decided to publish early sketches rather then finished drawings. He also tries an understandable device of having a distant friend of Lizzie's narrate the story as though she's personally investigating what really happened. I get it, its meant to give a more personal touch to the narrative. It doesn't work primarily because we know nothing about this woman and Geary himself seems to sort of forget she's supposed to be telling the story. I would have been perfectly happy with just a straight retelling of the story without a mary sue being shoehorned in.
I definitely learned some interesting little tidbits about a case that is, if nothing else, very intriguing. Lizzie and her family lived a very complicated and combative life and had she been born in another time she would have benefitted greatly from some kind of therapeutic intervention and perhaps a career to use her many (repressed) talents and energy. Instead she lived a life of stifling propriety with a father too cheap and autocratic to give his daughters the opportunity of at least a pleasurable life despite a vast fortune that could have made them all comfortable and happy.
Is it possible that Lizzie simply lost it? Stifled for too long under her father's endless rules and restrictions and increasingly wrathful over his clear intentions to give much of her inheritence to his new wife's family? Yes it is. But its equally possible that she was simply the most convenient person to lay the blame on for a group of investigators who did a shoddy job at best and simply had to arrest someone.
I guess we'll never know....
xterminal's review
3.0
Rick Geary, The Borden Tragedy (Nantier Beall Minoustchine, 1997)
I've always been intrigued by Geary's Treasury of Victorian Murder, and I've read one in the past (his treatise on H. H. Homes, natch), but it took me quite a while to get round to my second dip into this particular pool. Now that I've read The Borden Tragedy, I have a firmer idea of why that is.
My main problem with the book (as it was with the last one) is the artwork. It's thick, heavy-handed, almost fuzzy in places. I got the idea this is to give it a period feel. If so, I can't really tell you if it succeeded or not, but I can tell you it gets annoying after a while. Secondarily, the book is 90% narrative, rather than letting the characters carry it. Geary is creating docudrama here, but framing it as straight documentary. The end result is, well, boring. And possibly duplicitous, depending on your point of view.
A decent overview of the case, but reads like a textbook. Read for research rather than entertainment. ***
I've always been intrigued by Geary's Treasury of Victorian Murder, and I've read one in the past (his treatise on H. H. Homes, natch), but it took me quite a while to get round to my second dip into this particular pool. Now that I've read The Borden Tragedy, I have a firmer idea of why that is.
My main problem with the book (as it was with the last one) is the artwork. It's thick, heavy-handed, almost fuzzy in places. I got the idea this is to give it a period feel. If so, I can't really tell you if it succeeded or not, but I can tell you it gets annoying after a while. Secondarily, the book is 90% narrative, rather than letting the characters carry it. Geary is creating docudrama here, but framing it as straight documentary. The end result is, well, boring. And possibly duplicitous, depending on your point of view.
A decent overview of the case, but reads like a textbook. Read for research rather than entertainment. ***
More...