Author: Pat Shand
Publisher: Silver Dragon Books (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Sarah Dill.
Thomasina lost her parents at a young age and went to live with her grandmother, but soon, for financial reasons, they had to move in with Thomasina's aunt and uncle and her uncommunicative cousin. Here life is pretty average, ordinary, normal and slightly annoying to her.
One morning, Thomasina wakes up to find her pet snake missing from its tank, and when she goes upstairs from her basement room which she shares with Abuela, she discovers that her whole family, apart from grandma, has been turned into household pets such as a dog, a cat, a parakeet, and a lizard.
Meanwhile, her snake is now a rather attractive young man. Somehow the snake knows how this happened and leads Thomasina to the culprit whom she actually, kinda, knows. He confesses that it was all a magic spell gone wrong, and he takes her with him to his native magic land where they hope to get things resolved.
The gray scale art work and the story were both excellent, and I fully recommend this story for how entertaining and unique it is. The main female character, Thomasina, can certainly show a heck of a lot of young adult female leads a thing or two about being a fearless, kickass, strong female.
The only issue I had with it was the poor performance on the iPad in Bluefire reader. This is a new iPad with a lot of memory and yet sometimes a page would take six seconds to load, or the page would fail to swipe until I had swiped or tapped it two or three times. To be fair, this isn't the only comic I've had this problem with, but it is irritating.
