


Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre ( King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic. Pivoting from her innovative Merciful Crow series to retell an often revisited fairy tale, Owen delivers a cynical, sarcastic, devious, damaged, and self-aware antihero, a climactic crime caper, and a twisty legal-political thriller.Ī lush and lively adventure replete with romance, revenge, and robbery. In this vaguely early modern Germanic setting, Vanja and many characters read as White. Romantic entanglements and malevolent magic complicate matters further. Irreverent toward immortals and fiercely independent, Vanja must make alliances, apologies, and amends if she wants to survive. But the stakes rise, the countdown starts, and tension builds as a goddess curses Vanja, the zealous young investigator Junior Prefect Emeric Conrad arrives, and the predatory margrave Adalbrecht returns from battle to rush Gisele into marriage.

Revenge against abusive aristocrats is a bonus. Sick of being a servant and repeatedly abandoned-first by her mother, then by her adoptive goddess godmothers, Death and Fortune-Vanja’s saving up for her escape from the Blessed Empire of Almandy, hoping to outrun Gisele, her thefts, the law, and the gods. Displacing Kör-prinzessin Gisele, soon-to-be Markgräfinvon Reigenbach, after arriving in Bóern, Vanja has been masquerading as both Gisele and Greta, the maid, using her newfound access to steal from the elite as the Pfennigeist (Penny Phantom). Part heist, part heart-wrenching coming-of-age novel, this is a new take on “The Goose Girl.”Īn incorrigible thief, 17-year-old Vanja Schmidt’s biggest theft was her mistress’s life.
