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A review by classics_and_chamomile
Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga by Weshoyot Alvitre, Lee Francis IV
4.0
Before I get into my criticism of the book, because I have a few, I would like to say first and foremost that it must have been an incredibly difficult book to write. It's not a topic to be taken lightly, and yet the authors wanted to make it accessible for everybody so that people could learn about the history of native American people and the wrongs that had been done to them.
That said, I feel like it could have been so much more.
I understand the authors' choice of creating a graphic novel. Pictures to accompany (fewer) words make the story easier to digest and understand. But... should it really be easy to take in? I think that if it had been written as a novel in first-person or close third-person, it would have hit so much harder because the reader gets to spend more time with the characters and could get to know them better. It's always so much more gut-wrenching when a person that has been fleshed out, become almost real, is hurt in a way that can't be healed. The graphic novel, by using an omniscient third-person narrator and having slightly jarring POV changes, mitigates the intensity of the reader's connection to the characters. I think the graphic novel itself could in fact a storyboard for a written novel—that would work really well. But Ghost River had so much potential that I'm a little bit disappointed by it.
All that said, it is still a gorgeous graphic novel. I wasn't the biggest fan of the art style, but it had the right feeling to it for a story like this. I would encourage reading it because I had no idea about the Conestoga massacre, and I feel like it's an important part of history that can't be glossed over.
That said, I feel like it could have been so much more.
I understand the authors' choice of creating a graphic novel. Pictures to accompany (fewer) words make the story easier to digest and understand. But... should it really be easy to take in? I think that if it had been written as a novel in first-person or close third-person, it would have hit so much harder because the reader gets to spend more time with the characters and could get to know them better. It's always so much more gut-wrenching when a person that has been fleshed out, become almost real, is hurt in a way that can't be healed. The graphic novel, by using an omniscient third-person narrator and having slightly jarring POV changes, mitigates the intensity of the reader's connection to the characters. I think the graphic novel itself could in fact a storyboard for a written novel—that would work really well. But Ghost River had so much potential that I'm a little bit disappointed by it.
All that said, it is still a gorgeous graphic novel. I wasn't the biggest fan of the art style, but it had the right feeling to it for a story like this. I would encourage reading it because I had no idea about the Conestoga massacre, and I feel like it's an important part of history that can't be glossed over.