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The Raven Boys: The Graphic Novel, adapted from Maggie Stiefvater's book by Stephanie Williams, illustrated by Sas Milledge with colors by Abel Ko:

The dialogue in this adaptation is faithful to the novel, but perhaps too faithful. I think Williams missed an opportunity to take some of the novel's internal reflection and transform it into dialogue. Like it would have been easy, and told us a lot about both of them, to have Blue lean over to a coworker and mutter, "Check out President Cellphone," when Gansey first walks into Nino's.

That means this is missing a lot of the character work that you get in the novel, like Gansey's utter devotion to the Pig (which I don't think is ever called by name here?). Blue's initial disgust for Gansey also seems much weaker. Oddly, 300 Fox Way is exactly as empty as the novel makes it, with only the three main psychics, and Blue and Calla (briefly) present on the page. That's one thing that would have been easy to show in this visual format, just fill the panels with all those aunts and cousins Blue swears are in the house but who never seem to impact much of anything except the state of the kitchen sink. (Don't tell me the house is crowded and then not show me constant fighting over who gets to use the bathroom. This bothers me every time I read the book.)(Though this does fix Blue's age to match the rest of the series, and I can't tell you how happy I was that her explanation to Adam got cut off before she could say "young.")

As an adaptation, it feels watered down, and I can't judge it as a standalone graphic novel because I've read the book so many times I brought all that with me and also missed the things it left out. Like Gansey's Topsiders, and Blue's weird clothes, and Adam's Coke shirt. Not that any of these things are important on their own, but they tell us something about the characters. That Gansey looks like he came out of a yachting magazine and has about the same amount of understanding about the real world as if he did, and how Blue's punk do-it-yourself ethos applies not just to her clothing and her room, but her approach to life, and that for the psychics, Adam, in that crowd of Raven Boys, is at first only as memorable as the slogan on his t-shirt. The detailed artwork is gorgeous, however, especially the lush colors of Cabeswater, and Ronan's back tattoo is fucking amazing, and I support the decision to make Blue and her family Hispanic because this is a very white story otherwise.

So for me, this is a nice effort, and a pleasant read, and it gets a lot right, but mostly it just made me want to read the book again, as, inevitably, all graphic novel adaptations do. But it might be perfect for reluctant readers or those who prefer graphic novels.

Contains: child abuse and domestic violence; wasps; reference to past suicide attempt; the text is small, thin, and faint enough that it's difficult to read in print.

The Void Trilogy is three books that are really just one long, enormous book: The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and The Evolutionary Void. They don't stand on their own even as installments in a series and must be read one after another, no dawdling.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the Commonwealth Saga, its predecessor, which I remember as being dense but interesting science fiction. It had a lot of characters, in a lot of locations, but all were distinct and memorable and their stories slowly converged in a satisfying way. This book (all three of it) is written to the same formula, but bloated to the point where so much was happening, and for so little reason, that the people, locations, and factions all ran together despite them being on many different planets, which also ran together. The only memorable parts of the book were Edeard and Araminta, and in the beginning I mostly kept reading for Edeard, though I became less interested in him as time went on and he became so powerful that all that was left to do was wait for the corruption to set in. Luckily Araminta started to get more attention around that same time.

I think perhaps Hamilton is best held to two volume books because this story seriously got away from him in three. There was stuff in here that just did not need to be in here, and then once it became relevant again (if it ever did) Hamilton did not give a flying fuck whether you remembered it or not and refused to give you a hint even if it was referencing something from the last book or two thousand pages ago.

It's so long that by the time you get to the actual climax of the series it's like, they ask a guy not to do the thing that'll end the universe, and he's like, idk, and then they ask him once more with feeling and he's like, well, okay. There's plenty of excitement on the way, but talk about anti-climatic. And then everyone goes home to a happy ending because no one (with insurance) ever dies in this universe. They just get downloaded to new bodies. Though you do kind of forget about that while you're reading because the characters are in so much peril.

Also, and I don't know how else to put this, but every reference to sex read like it was written by a man, like the beautiful identical twins who married the same man, and the one guy in multiple bodies who told his singular-bodied girlfriend that he had to fuck other women with his other bodies while he was with her because she (the girlfriend) just made him so hot, baby.

The eye rolls I rolled.

Still, obviously I found something compelling about this in order to spend, according to Libby, something like 72 hours reading it. But if you're looking to get into granular space operas, I don't think this is the place to start with Hamilton.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )

Contains: Descriptions of sexual violence; graphic physical violence; animal harm/death; references to forced impregnation and forced abortion; "Oriental" used to describe people; lingers on fatness in a way that isn't positive; mind control; cops; and for the ebooks: so many OCR errors I was instantly transported back in time to 2009.