Looking For a Good Book

So, I read through this. Twice. And I just don’t know what to make of it!

A six-year-old girl, Penny, is in trouble – she was kidnapped by some really Bad people and now she won’t wake up. Doctors don’t seem to be able to help her, but a strange little dude appears out of nowhere and now Penny’s parents, Duncan and Sam are going to jump into Penny’s dreams to combat the forces that are still holding her.

Yeah. That’s kinda the story. So now 100 pages of bizarro action as Duncan and Sam fight strange dream creatures to save Penny.

In case you can’t tell by my description, this didn’t make much of a positive impact on me. I didn’t hate it – I actually kind of like dreamworld and bizarre circumstances – but it didn’t hook me. The need to save their child is a pretty commonly used device to draw a quick sympathy response.

It also uses some fairly standard gimmicks such as having a teddy bear actually be a gruff talking badass. Who saw that coming?

There is some interesting story here, but it could so easily be contained in half the space as we tend to spend too much time trying to be interesting.

If someone were to give me volume two, I’d likely think “Oh, yeah, I remember reading the first volume” and then give it a read, but I am in no way interested in making sure I get to read it.

Looking for a good book? The Moon is Following Us is a graphic novel that features a Wonderland-like dream world where a pair of parents and some oddball associates go into their daughter’s dream to try and save her.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Moon is Following Us

author: Daniel Warren Johnson

artist: Riley Rossmo and Mike Spicer

publisher: Image Comics

ISBN: 9781534328273

paperback, 120 pages