![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor
The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, by Shaenon Garrity & Christopher Baldwin, is an adorable YA-level graphic novel gently and affectionately poking fun at Gothic tropes. I really enjoyed it.
After being told by her teacher that she can't write yet another book report on Wuthering Heights, the Gothic-romance-obsessed teenage protagonist falls through a rift in reality into a place where the tropes are all true, from the gloomy castle to the brooding lord of the manor and creepy housekeeper and near-constant rain. The house is indeed hiding a dark secret, and she has to use her genre-trope savviness figure out what it is and find her way home.
What's actually going on is one of those twists that doesn't ruin the book but makes it even more fun, namely she's in a mobius-strip-style pocket universe affected by bleedover from the fictional imagination of our universe, which functions as a patch to keep out a Very Sinister Evil. Now the machinery that runs the pocket universe is breaking down, causing rifts like the one she came through, including rifts into the evil parallel universe that allow it access to this place and subsequently to our world. The people are all real people who have wandered in much as she has and become affected by the place's tropiness themselves.
I went into it expecting it to be more critically deconstructive than it is, but I was pleasantly surprised by how sweet and fun and affectionate it is towards its subject matter. It's clear that the creators expected and welcomed readers who genuinely like this kind of books and don't want to be told that they're bad and wrong. I really liked everyone, including the characters I was expecting to be set up not to like, and it's very funny and sweet and enjoyable, with extremely cute art.
After being told by her teacher that she can't write yet another book report on Wuthering Heights, the Gothic-romance-obsessed teenage protagonist falls through a rift in reality into a place where the tropes are all true, from the gloomy castle to the brooding lord of the manor and creepy housekeeper and near-constant rain. The house is indeed hiding a dark secret, and she has to use her genre-trope savviness figure out what it is and find her way home.
What's actually going on is one of those twists that doesn't ruin the book but makes it even more fun, namely she's in a mobius-strip-style pocket universe affected by bleedover from the fictional imagination of our universe, which functions as a patch to keep out a Very Sinister Evil. Now the machinery that runs the pocket universe is breaking down, causing rifts like the one she came through, including rifts into the evil parallel universe that allow it access to this place and subsequently to our world. The people are all real people who have wandered in much as she has and become affected by the place's tropiness themselves.
I went into it expecting it to be more critically deconstructive than it is, but I was pleasantly surprised by how sweet and fun and affectionate it is towards its subject matter. It's clear that the creators expected and welcomed readers who genuinely like this kind of books and don't want to be told that they're bad and wrong. I really liked everyone, including the characters I was expecting to be set up not to like, and it's very funny and sweet and enjoyable, with extremely cute art.
no subject
no subject
no subject
*adds to list*
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject