"The Night Bookmobile, a Graphic Novel" by Audrey Niffenegger( Abrams: 2010)
At first, I thought this book was a children's book, but it is definitely not. It is a dark story about a woman who finds a bookmobile that is full of the books she has read and the journals she has written. The artwork is wonderful but the story is not. I hated it. I would say this author has a love/hate relationship with books. Since I don't, I did not appreciate the tragic story of the character's relationship with the bookmobile.
It takes the premise of a magical story and I was expecting to read one but instead read a nightmare or something out of Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone. The artwork lulled me into the story and I fell for it and found myself in this nightmare of a book. Beware of this beautifully illustrated trap. It has everything one expects a nightmare to have: suicide, broken hearts, disappointment and loneliness. It is not the thing that books are made of or not what I have found over the years. Maybe, the story is a metaphor for something else and I am not getting it. It is true that if someone read only books and ignored people one might miss out on life, but books are written by people. There is no way you can miss the people who wrote them.
If reading is your thing, give this book a skip.
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