Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Past and Present: Mercury

Another Cybils book!  Hope Larson's Mercury is a Cybils Graphic Novel (Young Adult) finalist, so I ordered the library to deliver it to me.  Cowed, they obeyed.  It's a quick read, but I struggled with it.  I think part of this is my unfamiliarity with graphic novels, but I had problems telling the characters apart.  There's even a joke about this in the text, because Tara is mistaken for the boy she ends up dating, but I continued hating panels with just heads in them because it was so hard for me to tell who was speaking without clues from their clothing.  I think the main characters in both story lines were supposed to look like each other, but it was hard to be sure since I couldn't tell anyone apart.  I'm not very visually acute, I guess.

I also didn't really get what the two stories had to do with each other.  There's the modern line with Tara and the boy, and her house has burned down and she has issues with her mom.  There's the past line where Josie lives in the house that will burn down, and has a boy friend who is a bit shady (for values of "a bit" that vary widely) and whom her mom hates.  Which are both fine, but I didn't feel they added to each other, but maybe I was distracted by spending so much time figuring out on a page by page level who was who.  C

The Amazon link is from the Cybils page, so it should benefit them.

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