Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre ( King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic. Other than the two mentioned above, almost all characters follow a white default.Īll the right elements are present without amounting to much-and yet, when something is so on-trend there will doubtless be fans. Violence-spells are cast by literal bloodshed-and provocative questions (What are the gods? What is divinity? What rights does power confer?) swirl together, but the limited character development and mediocre writing diminish the high concept into paint-by-numbers YA fantasy.

Each teen has a goal: Nadya wants to bring the gods back to Tranavia Serefin wants to get drunk (but maybe also stop his power-mad father) and magically altered Malachiasz wants to stop the war but may also have some other plans up his sleeve.

Nadya soon connects with Malachiasz, also the enemy but strangely attractive, and his two token brown companions, Rashid and Parijahan, all of whom are good with weapons and have their own revenge agenda (that never really comes to the fore perhaps a later volume will tie up the many loose ends). Once it was sparkly vampires now it’s brooding bad boys, dark magic, and colliding kingdoms.ĭual perspective narration cuts between Nadya, a Kalyazi cleric raised in a remote monastery who speaks with gods, and Serefin, Tranavian High Prince and blood mage from a rival kingdom first seen destroying the monastery and killing a boy.

Emily duncan wicked saints