Two graphic novels

Grace Needs Space! by Benjamin A. Wilgus, illustrated by Rii Abrego (2023): Cute midgrade graphic novel about twelve-year-old Grace, who does not, in fact, need space. In fact, what she wants is solid ground. She has been raised on a space station by her mom (Evelyn, "Mom") and gets to go on a fun adventurous trip with her non-custodial mom* (Kendra, "Ba") to Titan, where she gets to touch water and land for the first time!!! Unfortunately, her Ba is busy working and on top of that is not a great, or well-practiced, parent and ruins the entire trip through completely realistic unreliability. There's also a fun, small sideplot of Grace getting her Ba to stop calling her "kiddo". Kendra also calls her "Gracie" and in the end, switches to "Grace".

Excellent art, especially of all the space stuff, and "what happens when an exciting trip you've been looking forward to is actually boring and goes badly because an adult doesn't plan very well" is an excellent, relatable plot both for the target audience and any adults who picked the book up, too.

*I do not recall any mention of a divorce in the book, just that they had been married. However, Evelyn and Kendra's interactions come off very (Mostly) Amicably Divorced to me.

Also I really love just how casual all this queer stuff is these days??? The relationship is not explained, the same way you, as a kid, are not given an exposition-dump into the parental statuses of all of your classmates when you are in third grade. Evelyn and Kendra got married at some point and traveled together. They no longer live together or travel together. Grace does not see Kendra very often. That's not the plot! The plot is about Grace being disappointed that her Titan trip doesn't go the way she wanted it to!

Sometimes you really realize you live in the future. Not only did I not get it out from the library specifically because it's queer moms, I didn't know it was queer moms when I got it out. I got it out because I was looking for space books for that age group. If it weren't for the line about Evelyn and Kendra getting married, and you just had the back copy to tell you that Kendra is the fun mom, you could assume that Kendra was a step-mom or bio-mom after an open adoption, and if you didn't look at the back or trust it to be correct, Kendra could have been any other relative or a family friend. There's no queer plotline! It's just queer folks living lives and having kids and also spaceships! It's not about them!

Can you imagine, a midgrade book with queer parents that is not about being a kid with queer parents?????? Queer divorced or separated queer parents???????

Livin' in the future.

Murder on the Orient Express: The Graphic Novel, originally by Agatha Christie, adapted by Bob Al-Greene (2023): This is one of those books that I have never read and yet, through osmosis know all about it: they all did it and they get away with it because the victim deserved it.

So, not having read the original, I can't speak for how well this adaptation works as an adaptation, but standing on its own, it's very good.

With one, very strange, caveat. There seems to be a printer's error where a lot of pages are missing. This is a brand-new graphic novel. I checked the binding. We are not missing a bunch of pages because they fell out. They're just not in here. It goes from page 122 to page 139, chapter 5 is followed by chapter 8. I checked the front and the back to see if there's some kind of indication that this was done on purpose, I cannot find any. It is not jarring in the moment; I only noticed because I was checking the page numbers to make sure I didn't accidentally do two at a time. It really only became apparent when they were going over the suspects again and mentioning things that didn't happen on page, and even then you could say, well, it's an adaptation, maybe they just cut that stuff.

It may say something not complimentary about this book that you can go from one Talking To A Suspect chapter to another Talking To A Suspect chapter and not notice that a bunch of pages have gone missing.

I stuck a note on the library book to make sure to highlight this issue for the library staff.

As for the original, I'm not sure I'm gonna read it. I got the ebook out but I'm not sure if the subject matter of the backstory would be too much for me; on the other hand, perhaps the nature of a graphic novel, with pictures and all that, evoke more than it does in the original.

In general, I'm open to recommendations for mystery books that are not murder mysteries. (I've read Sherlock Holmes.)

Thank you for the reviews - I’ve had the adaptation of the Christie in a basket for a while and now can justify buying it to go along the rest of my Christie shelf, and Grace sounds delightful. Non-murder mysteries are surprisingly hard to find - I read a lot of that genre and am struggling to think of any.

Every so often I look for recs lists from libraries and stuff of non-murder mysteries and it often seems like the best it can do is "everyone thinks someone was murdered but it turns out that they weren't" which is not really the same as non-murder mystery, you know?

I really liked the Murder On The Orient Express graphic novel but checking wikipedia, I see they did change some stuff, such as it's now the son of the defense attorney rather than the son of the lawyer. So I'd say definitely go into it with the knowledge that it's an adaptation and not a straight graphic novelization of the book. But the art is well done and I like that you get various reaction shots and body language and other things that you probably don't get in a book.

Two graphic novels

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