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QueenBoadicea
Jul 23, 2015QueenBoadicea rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Told partly in prose and partly as a graphic novel, this story latches its hooks into you and doesn’t let go. Andrew is a character both haunting and haunted, as he navigates a hospital where the staff are either stupid or incredibly negligent. How it is that no one realizes he’s not a real employee but a missing accident victim is baffling. But the novel gets you to suspend belief as Andrew tries to come to grips with a horrifying tragedy that left him an orphan and only child. The prose is sometimes spare and easy and at other parts sublime; at times it seems to come from someone much older than the narrator. The reader is battered back and forth by Andrew’s dilemma, his convoluted negotiations and his ongoing delusions that might be a form of madness or a bizarre attempt to cope. The graphic pages are simplistic but the story they tell is menacing in its noir landscape and harrowing story. As a reflection of Andrew’s mind, they are brilliant even when they seem to have little or nothing to do with his reality. This is an adult novel that cleverly guises itself as a YA fiction. However, I would recommend strongly that both adults and adolescents read it as a treatise on what it means to struggle through grievous loss and get to the other side.