Reviews

This story follows Lacuna as she is forced to leave her home, The Swamp of Ink, and travel to a distant kingdom. She is ousted by a Will-o'-the-wisp, and bargains with it that she will leave and tell others how beautiful it is, but to never travel to the Swamp of Ink, and the Will-o'-the-wisp agrees not to kill her. Lacuna does not find her road to the Northern Kingdom without her fair share of trials, but she eventually does make it there and struggles to find her place in a new country.

There’s a bit heavy-handedness with the metaphors at the beginning of this story, but by the time I got into the third chapter, I stopped making obvious connections to the current state of migration affairs and just read the story because I was interested in what was happening with Lacuna. This title is a good one to give to children as a way to explain some of the seriousness of what is happening with migration issues. The art is beautiful and compelling.

Sara's Rating: 8/10
Suitability level: Grades 6-12

This review was made possible with an advanced reader copy from the publisher through Edelweiss.

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amschelly153's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

It brought up some good points and is beautiful but felt a little flat to me. Some of the characters who were antagonists were depicted as helpful. It would spark conversation but also, I’m unsure about the ending.

Content Warnings

yasminwooldridge's review against another edition

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4.0

Wonderful illustrations and a marvellous little story to go with it.

madam_librarian's review against another edition

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3.0

The content of the story was fine (although I did spend far too much time questioning the logic, but that’s more my own personal issue). But I cannot rate it higher than 3 stars because this book was just so frustrating to read physically. I’m young and still have good eyes; I read in pretty dim lighting totally comfortably. But damn, there was some text in here that was VERY difficult to read— black text on a dark gray or dark blue background and teeny tiny punctuation marks with all capitalized letters (making it hard at times to tell where sentences started and ended). There was one speech bubble that I literally had to shine my phone flashlight on to read… Now imagine you’re a visually disabled person, and this book becomes totally inaccessible. Ridiculously terrible color contrast and font choices.

ebazilereads's review against another edition

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5.0

This was a haunting, beautiful graphic novel. The story felt very familiar while also feeling strangely otherworldly.

kyliiscurrentlyreading's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

daisylady's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

Content Warnings

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