My Rating: 2.0 / 5.0
The action in this book takes place at some point
within the time frame of Shadowfever, book 5 of the Fever Series, so if you
have not already read the earlier books you may want to avoid this review
because it contains SPOILERS for
those titles.
Now that the wall between the human and fae worlds
has been shattered, Dublin is at the center of a war. As the newly-freed
Unseelie bring death and destruction to the people trying to survive in the
warzone, Mac faces the most deadly enemy that she has ever encountered. The
Fear Dorcha is hunting Dublin’s streets, choosing victims close to her and
leaving them horribly mutilated.
I read the first Fever book, Darkfever, with my
book group and was so captivated by the story that I went on to read all five
titles in the series, so I was quite excited to see this book arrive in the
library. I am not familiar with graphic novels, although I enjoyed comics as a
child, so this was a new experience for me.
The story itself was fairly brief and simplistic,
which was rather disappointing after reading the novels, which had a great
feeling of depth in the world building and character development. The Fear
Dorche is a suitably terrifying adversary, but there is little sense of real
danger and it is defeated rather too easily for my liking. It was a very quick
read, even for me and I am a very slow reader, so I would have been rather
angry if I had bought a copy to read. I am also not convinced that anyone who
was not already familiar with the series would enjoy this title: although there
is some background given, I doubt that it would be enough for a reader new to
this world.
However, the biggest problem was the format itself.
The artist had markedly different ideas about the look of many of the
characters and places from the ones that I had in my head. Some of them seemed
to be at odds with the descriptions I remembered from the books. This was
especially true of Barrons in his animalistic form, which was much more human
than was described in the books, so much so that it makes it laughable that Mac
did not recognize him. I was also very unimpressed by the version of Mac that
we are given. The actual depiction is fairly similar to how I had imagined her,
but she is constantly presented in very scanty or provocative clothing and in
poses that would give her severe backache and were too reminiscent of soft
porn. Not only did I find this detracted from her character’s toughness, but it
seemed to be misplaced in a book that will surely have a mostly female
readership.
The presentation of Dublin was also a problem, as
it looked far too much like a generically American city rather than one on
Europe. However, I feel that the biggest weakness of the illustrations was
their presentation of the Unseelie. Somebody somewhere said that radio has the
best pictures, and this is also true of books, where only our imagination
limits what images we ascribe to the people and places being described. This is
why we are often disappointed by film of television adaptations, and I was very
underwhelmed by the Unseelie, who were nowhere near as terrifying and
otherworldly as I had imagined. This was one reason why the sense of danger was
so lacking here, whilst in the novels it was a constant companion: these
Unseelie just did not look deadly enough to make them scary.
I was pleased to see that I was not the only
reviewer to have issues with the illustrations. Christine at The
Happily Ever After . . . has similar reservations to mine, and gave the
book a similar rating. I guess that I need to be much more careful if I
approach a graphic novel in the future.
