Monstress: Awakening by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda
Hello Books Lovers,
and welcome back. Today the blog is officially back active. How is your summer going instead? Have you chosen the sea or the mountains? I say that in these two weeks I have had little time to relax because I had to prepare at last-minute to take the university entrance test so nothing but relaxation, and as always when I’m on vacation I read less than what I was expecting to 🙁
However, as you can see from the title, every now and then I also bring you some graphic novels, one of them is Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. This saga consists of 5 volumes, all published by Oscar Vault for the Oscar Ink series. For now I have only read the first volume but I hope to be able to recover the others soon, but too many books are coming out, it is practically impossible to keep up with all the new releases, especially in September.
Moving on to this review instead, at the beginning I tell you the truth I could not follow the story well. All the graphic novels I have read so far didn’t have as many words and as small as this one and that created a bit of difficulty for me, but as soon as I got to the heart of the story and started to understand Maika’s origins and all the meaning of her adventure this volume finished in the blink of an eye.
This first volume is called the Awakening, and maybe at first glance it might not make sense, as indeed every title of a book, but by reading you will understand why and you will immediately want to move on to the second to follow the story of Maika and her friends and companions that she “recruits” along the way.
Maika doesn’t have an easy life. Her mother is dead and she is about to be sold, and this happens and she is imprisoned, but the power that harbors within her is too great to be contained, it wants to go out, it’s hungry, and thanks to that she will free herself, and also free the other prisoners and will undertake her journey, or rather escape, to answer all the questions she has in her head.
I would still like to spend a few words to talk about the illustrations, among the best I have seen so far. The colors make all the details more vivid, the shades of color itself are spot on according to the scene, the suspense that even the illustrations must create, it’s all a mix that makes reading more enjoyable. And then there are the characters that are also amazing for the simple fact that they are complicated, intricate and in my opinion not easy to draw with that aspect and instead Sana, the illustrator, did it perfectly.
