D C reviewed The Girl Who Owned a City by Dan Jolley
Review of 'The Girl Who Owned a City' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This was a weird read. I usually don't like to pick up graphic adaptations of existing novels (I prefer to read the originals) but I didn't check this one and only realized it was an adaptation when I got home. I was still excited to read it, but even though the art was eye-catching and the story had a good concept, when I finished I felt like I had missed something. The most obvious contradiction was that the main characters looked and sounded nothing like 10 to 12 year-olds, but I know it's hard to nail down kid characters in all kinds of art. I think it might have made a little more sense if they went up to 16 or so. Still, it took checking out the reviews on the original novel to understand what was really weird. All the overly preachy parts of the book, condemning charity and …
This was a weird read. I usually don't like to pick up graphic adaptations of existing novels (I prefer to read the originals) but I didn't check this one and only realized it was an adaptation when I got home. I was still excited to read it, but even though the art was eye-catching and the story had a good concept, when I finished I felt like I had missed something. The most obvious contradiction was that the main characters looked and sounded nothing like 10 to 12 year-olds, but I know it's hard to nail down kid characters in all kinds of art. I think it might have made a little more sense if they went up to 16 or so. Still, it took checking out the reviews on the original novel to understand what was really weird. All the overly preachy parts of the book, condemning charity and praising hard work and self-sufficiency, are apparently libertarian views, and the author was a staunch libertarian who based the characters in the book on his children, creating a sort of model for them to aspire to. I almost gave this a three star review, but that was mostly because the art is cool and and I like the high-level concept of the story. The problem is that plot didn't feel like it was exploring what would really happen if children were left without adults; it felt like Nelson was projecting his ideal society onto a "blank slate" society he contrived by killing all the adults. He didn't need his characters to be like real children, who still need a lot of time and support before they can do anything like become doctors or farmers or soldiers. He needed them to be like children in one way: they have no way of supporting the way of life that is possible with adults. Because their lifestyle was so disrupted, he could then supplant it with a strange, callous sort of meritocracy. He also manipulated other children into the roles of gang aggressors to contrast them with his upstanding workers, but the truth is that real children don't form violent gangs when their parents die en masse. And in the end there was no point in caring about any of the people in the novel because what really wins the day is a lecture on libertarianism. Not grit or wisdom or character development, just a high-concept moral and economic philosophy which leaves everyone in the story looking like a selfish jerk or a lowlife thief. The more I think about it, the more it disappoints me. I really wanted to like a graphic novel called The Girl Who Owned a City.
