Author/Illustrator: Jennifer Jigour
Publisher: Smith Publicity - Walkabout Designs
Rating: worthy
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!
I have to confess to having a hard time in deciding how to rate this graphic novel, and the primary reason for my discomfort is that I simply didn't understand it. I mean, yeah, I got what it was about in very general terms (at least I think I did!): a rather conflicted young woman who flew airplanes for the US military in World War Two is blackmailed by the very government she aided when she's discovered in a gay club. She's threatened with exposure if she doesn’t work for the government in the form of taking a trip to Moscow to track down an agent of theirs who has gone missing. Homosexuality was considered a crime in 1949, of course, although I imagine it was far worse for men than ever it was for women. The "punishment" for it was to be confined for a time in close quarters with people of your own gender. How that really constitutes a punishment is somewhat of a mystery, but let’s move right along...!
Jigour does an amazing amount of work in illustrating some two hundred pages, but very little work in writing a story! I found myself wondering, time after time, what the heck was supposed to be happening. The drawing is competent if very simplistic, and the coloring is really superb (to my amateur eye, of course!), but there was frame after frame after frame where I could find no indication of a story, or a plot or even forward motion. I really got lost in all of that, and sometimes that was in a good way, but more often it was in confusion. I tried to catch up on what I was supposed to be experiencing when the minimalist text returned.
The novel has a surrealist feel to it, like it's a trip through someone's dream rather than something which is really happening, and indeed, I'm sure most of it was memory, dream and hope, but not all of it, and sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the one and the other. This was annoying to me, because I had gone into this expecting one kind of a story and I felt, at times, like I was being force-fed another!
However, overall I'm feeling positive about it, especially given how intriguing volume two looked. OTOH I was intrigued by volume one and look where that got me! I honestly think that Jigour (great name BTW) has some good stories in her, I'm just not sure this is one of them! I do want to encourage this kind of graphic novel to go right ahead confusing me, however, so I am going to rate this one worthy with the above caveat, and leave it up to you guys out there to decide for yourselves whether there needs to be an emptor added somewhere in there!
