Totally in love with Maddy Kettle: The Adventure of the Thimblewitch

Beautiful, whimsical, enchanting, playful. I tore through Maddy Kettle: The Adventure of the Thimblewitch and needed to see more; there simply isn’t enough of author-illustrator Eric Orchard’s work. Unfortunately, a scrounge around the web revealed little more than some old interviews and that he graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (does he earns points just for being Canadian?). Online, he is frequently referred to as “an up-and-coming illustrator.” I think it’s safe to say that he has arrived.

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Maddy is an Arizona girl (holla!) who needs to turn her parents, currently an adorable pair of kangaroo rats, back into humans. Her adventures lead her to fantastical creatures, magical machinery, and delightful surprises. Some scenes are reminiscent of Dorothy visiting Oz.

Others, of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells—a steampunk aesthetic quietly seeps into many frames.

Besides the talent and skill with the individual illustrations, the momentum between frames is what takes this book to another level. Look at this page: a chain reaction from the first frame causes the banjo string to snap in the second, a zoom out in the third frame flavours the entire page with humour and drama, and now we know why Maddy is looking down in frames four and five.

Yes, this is a children’s graphic novel. But it is more than that. It is a work of art. I want it for my (future) children. But I also want it for me.

(note: I received this as an ARC ebook for free, but that didn’t affect my opinions stated here)

An Arabian Nights Remix: Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn

If you were to guess that this book is a retooled tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, you would be correct. Like any good fairy tale, it is not incredibly original. We seek out fairy tales because of their familiarity. Consider why most western fairy tales have events in sets of three (e.g. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Twelve Dancing Princesses and the three night challenge…) – to let us get comfortable but not too comfortable, to add suspense as we search for the change in the pattern, to give us a skeleton for retelling and embellishing the tale for the next generation.



The authors, Danielle Ackley-McPhail and Day Al-Mohamed, rely heavily on the structure of a couple of the more famous Arabian folk tales: there are forty thieves, a vast treasure that once belonged to the caliphate, an enchanted cavern that reveals itself to the words “open sesame”, and a djinni (anglicised: genie) that is trapped in a bottle and a ring, among other elements that readers familiar with the traditional tales will recognize. But they go beyond the familiar to weave a tapestry infused with strands of Arabic, Persian, and Egyptian culture and vocabulary, create scenes that transport the readers to the early twentieth century Arabia (if it had magic and steampunk additions), and teach us about the nature of the Islamic faith through the patient piety of Baba Ali.

Ali is a 18-year-old Arab boy, doing an engineering apprenticeship in England. The book begins by following him as he seeks to complete a simple errand, but shows his exhaustion as he is discriminated against and antagonized by the homogenous, unwelcoming streets of London.