Dream of the Butterfly Vol 1 by Richard Marazano

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Richard Marazano is a French writer and illustrator, and in this work he seems to have channeled Chinese mythology very heavily into a very lighthearted story about young girl who strays in a snowstorm from her valley to a nearby one in which is a village occupied by animals who seem very resentful of humans Actually, given how we treat animals I for one am not at all surprised by their attitude.

The girl is a very strong female character and I recommend this story for that to begin with, but it's much more than that. The story is very whimsical, and quirky even, I tend to run in the opposite direction when I read of a story being described as full of whimsy or with quirky characters, but this one nailed it perfectly.

The girl seems resigned to living in this town because no one will help her get back. She's boarded with a foster family of birds, and finds a job working in an energy factory - she has to change out the hamsters in their wheels when they become tired - but her lunches of packed worms, she could do without. She eventually learns she's not the only human child in town.

Because she is a human, Tutu is spied upon by the emperor through his rabbit secret service. The rabbits are adorably inept, but they are also actually helpful to Tutu when she gets lost or doesn't know which bus to catch. Known as yuè tù (moon rabbit) in China, the idea behind these is that while the Moon may look to us westerners like it's the face of a man in the Moon, many other cultures see it as a rabbit in the Moon, which is more intriguing to me.

If you look hard, you can see the long ears (Mare Foecunditatis and Mare Nectaris)stretching to the right, about half way down the Moon's right side, from the head (Mare Tranquilitatis where Apollo Eleven landed) to the left, and the body (Mare Serenitatis and Mare Imbrium below it on the left edge of the Moon's disk. Below that is the Oceanis Procellarum with the big back legs and a tail sticking out to the left. The rabbit appears to be sitting by a box or a bowl, (Mare Nubium), and some cultures see this as a mortar, in which the rabbit is grinding something using a pestle.

The emperor takes a great interest in Tutu and wants her to help him by catching a rare white butterfly, but she's not very impressed with him or the opera he writes. She's especially disrespectful of his surrogate robots which tend to break down when faced with Tutu's sarcasm.

This story was a delight through-and-through, and my only complaint was that this is volume one, so the story didn't end! Although that's really a good thing because if it had ended, there would be no more to look forward to! As it was, I could have kept on reading this for many more pages than there were, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

The Chimpanzee Complex Vol 2 The Sons of Areas by Richard Marazano, Jean-Michel Ponzio

Rating: WARTY!

Here's a problem with series that single books never have to face: unless you, as a reader, can get your hands on the compendium edition, you have to root out all the individual volumes! Thus, series are in no way written for the reader, but for the lucrative gratification of money-grubbing authors and publishers. This is one major reason why I will never write a series. It's not worth selling out for.

And how dumb does a publisher have to be to favor a series (which you know they do, especially in the YA world) when they have no idea how good it's going to be? All they have is the first volume and a promise of two or more follow-ups. They have no way of knowing how good or bad those will be, yet they would rather commit to that, blinded by cash rewards, than give three single-volume authors a chance because they can only rake in one third the money with one volume? Screw them. That's not a world I want to be a part of.

Thus my issue with this, a graphic novel translated from the original French (Le Complexe du Chimpanzé: les Fils d'Arès), the very medium which tends to be, almost by definition, episodic. The library had volume two on display which was odd, and it looked interesting from a brief skim. The artwork by Jean-Michel Ponzio looked pretty good, but they didn't have volume one. It would have been wiser on the part of the library to have not put this out there without including the first volume.

Anyway, I figured to take a chance (and it failed)! The story made no sense whatsoever, and I suspected that even had I read volume one, and assuming it had impressed me enough (of which I confess I have some serious doubts) that I ever made to to volume two, it would still make no sense. The problem (again definitive of series) is that the story really goes nowhere. In volume two there can be no beginning - that bus left with volume one, and since there is a volume three, there can be no ending here. So all we have is this free-floating story fragment, and I could make neither têtes nor queues of it.

The plot? Well, that's an open question. Other than its dedication to cheapening the achievements of people like Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin, what does it offer? Nothing that I can see. In volume one, set in 2035, a space capsule plunges into the Indian Ocean and when it's recovered, it's found to contain Armstrong, and Aldrin - and no Michael Collins apparently! Collins became the most isolated and lonely man in the world (or rather out of it) in 1969 when, having dropped off his two companions on the Moon's surface, he went behind the Moon alone, and was out of touch with the rest of humanity for a period of time! Yet not a word about him!

In this volume, we meet this woman who is going to Mars, leaving behind her daughter. No father is evidently in sight although there is this guy who is supposedly in charge of the young girl, but who he was I have no idea. He wasn't very good at what he was charged with undertaking, for sure. But more to the point, what woman would do that to a young child? Going to the Moon for a week or ten days, I can see, but going on a round trip to Mars for a year? That's child abuse. Her daughter feels it pointedly too, and runs away from home (she seems to be completely unsupervised), yet while I was mildly interested in the daughter's adventure, I had no interest whatsoever in the mother's non-adventure, which while commendable in that she was not your usual pale Caucasian protagonist (she was Asian) was boring.

And who, in 2035, has an encyclopedic knowledge of Russian cosmonauts from 1961 (I love the rotational symmetry of that year!) - such that she knows the middle name and exact dates of Gagarin's life milestones? This is an example of truly bad writing, and frankly, that was the weakest link here - not only did the writing make no sense, it wasn't even inspired. I really disliked this story.