Title: Haven
Author: Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda
Series: Monstress #3
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Dark fantasy, Graphic novels, Steampunk
Dates read: 19th September 2019
Pace: Slow
Format: Graphic novel
Publisher: image
Year: 2018
5th sentence, 74th page: If we’re here, it’s because family protects family.
Maika Halfwolf has begun to unlock the mysteries of her past – but the challenges of the present are only growing. In this third volume of MONSTRESS, collecting issues 13-18, Maika’s journey takes her to the neutral city of Pontus, where she hopes to find temporary refuge from her pursuers. Unfortunately, Pontus may not be as safe as Maika and her allies had hoped.
s the impending war between humans and Arcanics creeps ever closer, and powerful players fight for the chance to control her future, Maika finds she must work with Zinn, the Monstrum that lives inside her, in order to ensure their mutual survival. But even that alliance might not be enough to prepare Maika for the horrors to come.
I’ve been putting off reading the next instalment in The Monstress series until it would complete a little more of one of my reading challenges… and when it finally came up on that week in my challenge… well, I completely devoured this. It probably helped that I was having a kind of dark week, and the darkness in the illustrations and storyline of this graphic novel hit the spot perfectly… now I just have to save up the money for the next book in the series…
I’m not someone who reads a lot of graphic novels… actually I’ve really only become interested in the genre in the last eighteen months… but for me, this is everything I never knew I wanted in a graphic novel. A fantastic combination of east and west… with a very healthy dose of mythology and steampunk thrown into the mix. But, mostly, I’ve loved how as this series has progressed, the story has gotten darker and darker, more complex and intensely twisty.
What started as an easy story about Maika Halfwolf has by this point become an incredibly complex tale of politics, war and the gods. There are a few points throughout which I lost a bit of track of who was who, but it was incredibly easy to quickly pick up the thread of the storyline again. After all, Liu and Takeda have done an amazing job of telling the story.
Although I enjoy this story, it is the stunning beauty and power of the illustrations which truly drew me in. There is an intensity and power to the panels which I haven’t seen in many illustrations, one that will leave goose bumps up your arms as you flick through the pages. And quite possibly linger in your dreams when you lay your head down at night.
