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pseud0bread 's review for:
Username: Evie
by Joe Sugg
It's not like me to be overtly harsh towards books that are clearly meant for a demographic that I am not a part of, but I feel like this one warrants an exception.
The art was pretty, but art alone will not support an entire graphic novel on its own. This is exemplified in the poor panel layout leading to weird and clunky pacing throughout that does nothing with the art at all to expand on any ideas; I suppose this could be because there are no ideas to expand on. And speaking of the story, it could have been hilariously bland and formulaic, except any humor that may have been found in its cliches was undermined by badly written characters and dialogue and a complete lack of self-awareness. There was nothing original or interesting about it at all, and was just yet another young-adult/teen romance but boiled down to its most basic, bland essence, with some pseudo-apocalyptic sprinkles thrown on top for flavor. Sprinkles taste like garbage, though, and so do literally nothing to give any kind of complexity to the story. The dialogue was stilted and awkward without exception start to finish, and some lines were so cliche that I can't believe an editor worked on this and wasn't immediately fired upon publication. I've never read, seen, or even heard of anything where a character says, "My work here is done," without irony until now. Truly cringe-worthy.
The characters themselves may as well have been cardboard cut-outs with cliche'd character tropes like "lonely outcast" and "sensitive jock" written on them in Sharpie; that would have at least been original. Instead, they were every "outcast" and "jock" since the beginning of teen lit, and though not all of them were completely two-dimensional, the deepest of the lot was just slightly thicker cardboard. There was zero character development, giving the characters no motivations for any of their actions. This left me with a lot of questions like: Why was Mallory such a bitch all the time? Why is Evie such an outcast? Is Lionel just vision-impaired, or is he actually a huge nerd? Who edited this and decided it was acceptable? None of these questions were even acknowledged.
This book was the same story as literally any other young-adult romantic fiction thing, but told in a graphic novel with worse dialogue and flatter characters. There is nothing special or interesting about it, and could have been executed far better by someone who knew how to organize a page in a graphic novel, or someone who knew how to write characters, or someone who knew how to write.
The art was pretty, but art alone will not support an entire graphic novel on its own. This is exemplified in the poor panel layout leading to weird and clunky pacing throughout that does nothing with the art at all to expand on any ideas; I suppose this could be because there are no ideas to expand on. And speaking of the story, it could have been hilariously bland and formulaic, except any humor that may have been found in its cliches was undermined by badly written characters and dialogue and a complete lack of self-awareness. There was nothing original or interesting about it at all, and was just yet another young-adult/teen romance but boiled down to its most basic, bland essence, with some pseudo-apocalyptic sprinkles thrown on top for flavor. Sprinkles taste like garbage, though, and so do literally nothing to give any kind of complexity to the story. The dialogue was stilted and awkward without exception start to finish, and some lines were so cliche that I can't believe an editor worked on this and wasn't immediately fired upon publication. I've never read, seen, or even heard of anything where a character says, "My work here is done," without irony until now. Truly cringe-worthy.
The characters themselves may as well have been cardboard cut-outs with cliche'd character tropes like "lonely outcast" and "sensitive jock" written on them in Sharpie; that would have at least been original. Instead, they were every "outcast" and "jock" since the beginning of teen lit, and though not all of them were completely two-dimensional, the deepest of the lot was just slightly thicker cardboard. There was zero character development, giving the characters no motivations for any of their actions. This left me with a lot of questions like: Why was Mallory such a bitch all the time? Why is Evie such an outcast? Is Lionel just vision-impaired, or is he actually a huge nerd?
Spoiler
Why does Jaspar even exist in this story?This book was the same story as literally any other young-adult romantic fiction thing, but told in a graphic novel with worse dialogue and flatter characters. There is nothing special or interesting about it, and could have been executed far better by someone who knew how to organize a page in a graphic novel, or someone who knew how to write characters, or someone who knew how to write.