Skip to main content

Graphic Novel Review: Persephone by Loïc Locatelli Kournwsky


Graphic Novel Review: Persephone by Loïc Locatelli Kournwsky




Quote: Oh great. Would little miss Botany care to fill is in, on what 'amazing plant' we are helping her hunt today?
The answer to that my pet! Pop a seed and next thing you know, you're laughing so hard that you can't stop.



Throw me the words 'Persephone and Hades', I will gobble up any piece of writing. So while looking for Persephone and Hades' art I found this graphic novel on Google books and I fell in love with it.

This book is a very loose retelling of the Persephone myth, it is devoid of the romance element but definitely based on the snatching of Persephone to the underworld. Set in fantasy land, divided between the prosperous upperland Eleusis and the barren sun-bereft underworld Hades.

A brief history of both the lands at the beginning sets the story in motion. Demeter is the strongest magician of Eleusis, who help end the war with Hades.

The art is so dense, mangaesque, beautifully coloured and the lettering is bewitching! Each panel and pages so nicely put. The art is busy and always keeps the story in motion. It had the softness in colour balance that we find in Makoto Shinaki cinema and the wild child like the energy in the Miyazaki Stories.

The story is fast and well developed, it is also predictable at the end. But it's a story about a mother and a daughter. A mother who would go to any lengths to save the child she found in the middle of the war. Persephone is like ordinary, she suffers because she believes she is not destined for greatness like her mother. Yet she tries to do the right thing in her best way by studying the plants and magic in Hades.

The consequences of great ambition are always paid by the population. The population of Hades who can't grow any crops, and they have been cut from rest of the world after losing the war and deprived of trade rights, though they have no reason to like Persephone an upperworlder, they do their best when Persephone tries to create potions and studies the damn fruit that turns people blue who consume it.

The book beautifully explains why the most depraved of the social rebel and join the war, as fox warrior puts it: the poor have nothing to lose when they fight 'the Haves'
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: When The River Sleeps by Easterine Kire.

Book Review: When The River Sleeps by Easterine Kire. Quote: Perhaps the answer lay not in striving but in being. In simply accepting that the loneliness would never be eliminated fully, but that one could deal with it by learning to treat it like a companion and no longer an adversary. Ville a hunter wakes up from a dream, ventures out to search for the heart-stone; that holds the power of the river that's asleep. And this stone is guarded by wailing-angry-widow-spirits. Many attempts have been made at magical realism in Indian English writing, and I didn't like them. My personal opinion is that magical realism needs a deep connection with nature, maybe never explicitly explored in the text, but the traces of that connection always shows in the words written. And I have always argued that North East India is the most fertile ground to plant the seeds of magical realism in. Easterine Kire, pens our deep connection with nature for the national readership to gawk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Word Addict...

                Witch that resides in my heart becomes rest less every-time I loiter down the only bookshop (actually there are many,only two of them have readable books) in my Town. The witch again goes wild, when her stumbling feet walks down College Street in Kolkata. My every visit to Kolkata compels the witch to go there and I feel immense joy running down my blood vessels         I chanced upon Penguin  blogspot  about the modern methods of buying books how times have changed and how the writer feels about it... I was having personal thoughts to write about my evolution as a book addict , and the blog post  helped me to write my own..                  Being a girl I know shopping is the best therapy to distress soul, but for me book buying is the biggest therapy which irritates my family. I still remember my first visit to College S...
1 comment
Read more

Book Review: #Orangetoons by Shreya Sen

Book Review: #Orangetoons by Shreya Sen Quote:You are anyways going to carry the baggage right? So how about caring nice things in it? Just the perfect little pocket size comics you need before you end your day and curl up under your dohar. Hilariously illustrated, gives you what was once known as pearls of wisdom and what we would call as: two penny thoughts every millennial carries in her purse. Superbly relatable if you wear glasses and have untamed hair and have a thing for boxers. I deliberately did not photograph the inside of this tiny book. But it is a good example on how to do your independent or self-publishing gig right, the size, the colour and the binding are to the point and nothing extravagant or flashy. A lesson for young creators of comics can learn from, keep it short and simple. Just get your own copy from @shreyasensagoli. I especially loved the art with the caption: Allow objects to change if you wish to preserve them!
Post a Comment
Read more