This is an excerpt from the new edition of Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories. The 69-page guide is expanded, updated, and freely available to you.
Here it is: a compilation comic of striking artwork and an unnerving story of fantasy, monsters, and disaster. Barbara Thorson is the eccentric and geeky young girl of great confidence who guides us through the pages. I Kill Giants is a work of beauty.
It is also unabashedly weird, following the example of Barbara herself. She is an afficionado of Dungeons & Dragons and she carries a hammer named “Covaleski” in her heart-shaped purse. She wears glasses, bunny ears, and she is convinced of her life’s purpose: to kill the giants that threaten her, her family, humankind.
Fantasy and reality twist through the pages of I Kill Giants, luring the reader into an experience of charm, horror, and humor. Metaphor and meaning battle it out like the giants they are. Niimura’s art is fierce. Kelly’s narration is crackling good. By the time we reach the story’s final revelations, we are disarmed and a little disoriented: a state that made this reader, at least, crumble in a fit of feeling. I love this book.
I Kill Giants won the Best Indy Book of 2008 award, and was listed as one of the top ten comics in New York Magazine in 2009. The Young Adult Library Services Association named I Kill Giants one of the top ten best graphic novels for teens in 2010.
Consider for people who are:
- Teenagers, especially the earnest and geeky ones
- Adults, especially the earnest and geeky ones
- People who struggle with their own vulnerability
Recommended Edition:
Image Comics
Paperback
$15.99
This paperback volume collects seven issues of the I Kill Giants comic into an edition that can now be termed as a graphic novel.
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