Tag: Graphic Novel

Blog Tour Review: Crushing by Sophie Burrows

Dini @ dinipandareads2 Comments

🥳 Happy Pub Day to Crushing! 🥳

Special thanks to Algonquin Young Readers for inviting me to be on the blog tour and for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Goodreads: Crushing
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
Release Date: 11 January 2022
Genre: Graphic Novel, Romance

Panda Rating:

(4 pandas)

She’s lonely and searching for a connection. He’s lonely and afraid to reach out.
Life in the big city means being surrounded by connections—making them, missing them, and longing for them. But is finding someone else really the answer to their problems?

Crushing, the stunning debut graphic novel from Sophie Burrows, is a story told in silence; a story without words but bursting with meaning; a story about loneliness and love.

Achingly beautiful, quietly defiant, and full of subtle wit and wisdom, Crushing is a unique meditation on the human condition in the twenty-first century, and a timely examination of young adult life in an age of isolation.

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Sophie Burrows is an award winning British writer, illustrator and comics creator. Inspired by the everyday, she loves to tell stories which explore themes of human behaviour, mental health and relationships. In 2019 she graduated from the MA in Children’s Book Illustration course at Cambridge School of Art, and subsequently won Student Illustrator of the Year 2019 at the V&A Illustration Awards.

Her first picture book as writer/illustrator, Ig Pig and Og Frog! was released in 2020, and her debut graphic novel, Crushing , publishes in 2021. Alongside her illustration, Sophie is also an associate lecturer and teaches on the MA in Children’s Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art.

Sophie lives and works in London with her partner Daniel. Besides drawing, she also loves to cook, and enjoys being creative in the kitchen. She is an avid music lover, and often spends her spare time watching live music and going to festivals. 

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TL;DR: Crushing is a graphic novel that I think will resonate with many of us because we’ve all felt loneliness and do feel lonely, especially since the pandemic. The artwork was simple, beautiful and vibrant with pops of red amidst the black and white, and the style complemented the quietness of the story very well. There was no plot but we follow the lives of our two protagonists as they navigate their everyday situations, searching for opportunities and connections, and it was simply so relatable. There may not be a happy ever after just yet but it’s certainly a hopeful new beginning! 🥰

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Blog Tour Review: Passport by Sophia Glock

Dini @ dinipandareads4 Comments

Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for Passport by Sophia Glock. Special thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for providing an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

Click here or on the banner above to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!

Goodreads: Passport
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: 16 November 2021
Genre: Graphic Novel, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Panda Rating:

(3.5 pandas)

Young Sophia has lived in so many different countries, she can barely keep count. Stationed now with her family in Central America because of her parents’ work, Sophia feels displaced as an American living abroad, when she has hardly spent any of her life in America.

Everything changes when she reads a letter she was never meant to see and uncovers her parents’ secret. They are not who they say they are. They are working for the CIA. As Sophia tries to make sense of this news, and the web of lies surrounding her, she begins to question everything. The impact that this has on Sophia’s emerging sense of self and understanding of the world makes for a page-turning exploration of lies and double lives.

In the hands of this extraordinary graphic storyteller, this astonishing true story bursts to life.

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Blog Tour Review: The Secret Garden on 81st Street by Ivy Noelle Weir

Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for The Secret Garden on 81st Street: A Modern Retelling of the Secret Garden by Ivy Noelle Weir. Special thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for providing an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

Be sure to click on the banner above to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!

Goodreads: The Secret Garden on 81st Street: A Modern Retelling of the Secret Garden
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: 19 October 2021
Genre: Middle Grade Graphic Novel

Panda Rating:

(4 pandas)

The Secret Garden with a twist: in this follow-up to Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, this full-color graphic novel moves Mary Lennox to a New York City brownstone, where she and her very first group of friends restore an abandoned rooftop garden…and her uncle’s heart.

Mary Lennox is a loner living in Silicon Valley. With her parents always working, video game and tech become her main source of entertainment and “friends.” When her parents pass away in a tragic accident, she moves to New York City to live with her uncle who she barely knows, and to her surprise, keeps a gadget free home. Looking for comfort in this strange, new reality, Mary discovers an abandoned rooftop garden and an even bigger secret…her cousin who suffers from anxiety. With the help of her new friends, Colin and Dickon, Mary works to restore the garden to its former glory while also learning to grieve, build real friendships, and grow.

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#5OnMyTBR: Graphic Novels

Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

Hello Mondays, welcome back to #5OnMyTBR, a meme created by the wonderful E @ The Local Bee Hunter’s Nook. This bookish meme gets us to dig even further into our TBRs by simply posting about five books on our TBR! You can learn more about it here or in the post announcing it. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!

This week’s prompt is: Graphic Novels.

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ARC Graphic Novel Review: The Grémillet Sisters by Giovanni Di Gregorio, Alessandro Barbucci

Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

Thanks to NetGalley and Europe Comics for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review

Goodreads: Sarah’s Dream (The Grémillet Sisters #1)
Publish date: 15 July 2020
Publisher: Europe Comics
Genre: Graphic Novel
Panda Rating:

Being sisters is never easy. But when you’re as different as Sarah, Cassiopeia, and Lucille, it’s even harder! The first is haunted by recurring dreams, the second lives with her head in the clouds, and the last spends most of her time with her cat. Then one day they discover a mysterious photo of their mother pregnant. Where was it taken, and who is the baby? And most importantly, why was this photo hidden away in the depths of the attic? To find out, they’ll have to venture into the tangled forest of the Grémillet family secrets!

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September 2020 Monthly Wrap Up!

Dini @ dinipandareads35 Comments

Wow, has it really been a month since I did my last wrap up? Because it still feels as if I did my August wrap up last week! 😂 Is time flying for you too or is it just me? Although some weeks this month have felt longer than ever, most days have gone by in a blink and before I know it Mondays have become Wednesdays have become Fridays, and then another week is over. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing either. We’re one step closer to having this flaming hot mess of a year be over but what comes next? That’s a question I’ve been really contemplating lately because I’ve been feeling a bit directionless looking forward to 2021 and I’m hoping an answer will come to me soon!

But before I digress further, let’s take a look at what this month of reading has been like. In September, I read a (surprising) 23 books but I read a lot of romance which I tend to speed through so maybe it’s not surprising. I’m actually not sure if this is all the books I’ve read because I haven’t been marking them properly on Goodreads but we’ll roll with it! I also DNF two more books this month and although the guilt made me push on for longer than I wanted to, I ended up putting both books down because they only made me miserable.

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August 2020 Monthly Wrap Up!

Dini @ dinipandareads13 Comments

Well it has certainly been a hot minute since I did one of these (April was my last one)! But since it’s already the end of August and I’m actually remembering to do a monthly wrap up on time, I thought I might as well do it. I don’t know about you but August passed in a literal blink for me! I definitely don’t think that I did anything noteworthy this month on both the work and personal life front, and to be honest, if you asked me what I did yesterday I don’t think I’d be able to tell you. It’s been that kind of brain foggy month and well, I’m just trying to keep my head above water and keep moving forward.

On a more positive note, I completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge to read 100 books this past Saturday and I honestly didn’t think I’d do it because my reading has been iffy at best this year. Thank goodness for the blog tours I’ve been on because they’ve been keeping me motivated and have given me the push I need to stay reading. Not that I haven’t wanted to read, it’s just that my moods have been all over the show lately and as a mood reader, books don’t usually get read very quickly, if at all, in my current state of mind.

Saying that, this month I managed to read a total of 15 books, not counting the second book I’ve DNF’d this year! Yes, you read that right, the infamous ‘non-DNFer’ has DNF’d not one, but two books in 2020. Like I’ve said before, I’m taking baby steps to DNF-ing more books and well, it’s two more than I DNF’d last year so, yay progress? 😬

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eARC Graphic Novel Review: Fangs by Sarah Andersen

Dini @ dinipandareads11 Comments

Goodreads: Fangs
Publish date: 01 September 2020
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Genre: Graphic Novel
Panda Rating:

A love story between a vampire and a werewolf by the creator of the enormously popular Sarah’s Scribbles comics.

Vamp is three hundred years old but in all that time, she has never met her match. This all changes one night in a bar when she meets a charming werewolf. FANGS chronicles the humor, sweetness, and awkwardness of meeting someone perfectly suited to you but also vastly different

I’m a big fan of the many Sarah’s Scribbles comics that I’ve seen online although I’ve never actually read through or purchased one of her books, and after reading Fangs I’m really questioning why! This was such a cute/weird/sweet love story between a vampire and a werewolf that had me laughing out loud and ‘awwing’ constantly. Talk about them feel good feels!

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April Monthly Wrap Up!

Dini @ dinipandareads11 Comments

To say that April was a bit of a wretched month for reading would be a bit of an understatement. Echoing the sentiment that many fellow bloggers have been saying in their wrap ups, while March felt like it crawled by, April was pretty much gone in a blink. I’m honestly not mad about it though. I’d ideally like to have a do-over of this shite month, but it is what it is. By now we all know that my reading took a huge nosedive this month is mainly because of Animal Crossing New Horizons… I had no idea how dangerous this game would be for me as I let my sister convince me to finally buy it–not that it was very difficult, mind you.

So here we are today… With the first exams I’ve ever failed in my life (O.W.L.s), a seemingly unscalable (e)ARC Mountain still to climb, and a total of seven books read this month. At least I have a nice (in game) island though, right? 😅

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eARC Graphic Novel Review: Eat, and Love Yourself by Sweeney Boo, Lilian Klepakowsky

Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

Goodreads: Eat, and Love Yourself
Publish date: 21 April 2020
Publisher: BOOM!Studios
Genre: Graphic Novel
Panda Rating:

A story about Mindy, a woman living with an eating disorder who has to learn how to love herself again.

In pursuit of the perfect body, Mindy buys the low-fat diet products and the glossy magazines which promise the secret to losing weight. One night, while perusing the aisles of the neighborhood convenience store for a midnight snack, she finds a new product. A chocolate bar called “Eat and Love Yourself”. On a whim, Mindy buys the curious candy, not knowing that with every piece of chocolate she eats, she will be brought back to a specific moment of her past — helping her to look at herself honestly, learn to love her body the way it is, and accepting love. Perhaps, she will even realize that her long lost high school best friend, Elliot, was more than just a friend…

Trigger warnings: Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, body shaming, binge-eating, purging

I got extremely excited when I saw this cover and read the synopsis. The comic covers an extremely important topic that is such a personal issue for so many people who have struggled with their weight, and loving and accepting themselves. So I’m pretty sad to say that the story gave me pretty mixed feelings and that ending was especially disappointing because it was so abrupt. I checked to see if this was a series but I couldn’t find any information on it. I’m kind of hoping that Mindy’s journey will continue but I have a feeling it won’t?

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