Starred review from October 24, 2016
Greenberg’s haunting first graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, made her an instant critical darling. In her follow-up, she returns to Early Earth, a three-mooned world of myth and magical realism, for a collection of feminist stories about “bad husbands and murderous wives and mad gods and brave women who don’t take shit from anyone.” In a frame story borrowed from The Thousand and One Nights, two women hold off a rapacious man by telling stories within stories, usually about other women getting themselves in and out of danger. Greenberg combines elements from fairy tales, children’s books, and folklore from around the world to create an original but teasingly familiar mythos. Above all, it’s a book about the power of storytelling, populating Early Earth with a secret society of storytellers, a grove of memory trees, and women treasuring literacy in defiance of a stern bird god. Greenberg’s primitive woodcut-style illustrations suggest folk art from another planet.
Starred review from November 15, 2016
With immersive storytelling and a wry sense of humor, Greenberg's latest, after The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013), regales readers with a series of tales that seem both timely and timeless. In a world presided over by an egomaniacal god called Birdman, women, nearly powerless, are forbidden from reading and writing. The story begins with two men, Jerome and Manfred, making a wager: If Manfred can take Jerome's wife's virtue, he gets both his wife and castle. Jerome's wife, Cherry, however, is remarkably clever (and Jerome is terribly dumb), so she and her lover, Hero, who's posing as her maid, enact a plan to foil Manfred's ham-fisted scheme. So begins 100 nights of vivid, enchanting stories about love, betrayal, family, and loyalty, and, Scheherazade-style, Cherry and Hero handily distract Manfred from his plan while spreading their stories throughout the land. Greenberg weaves classic fairy-tale tropes through the talessuch as magic pebbles, brave sisters, and angry kingsand some are undeniably drawn from familiar stories. But there's a distinctly modern sensibility to the message here, which makes the tales remarkably fresh. Greenberg's thickly drawn figures and scenes, rendered in blacks and grays with warm washes of color, look like offbeat folk art, echoing the archetypal nature of the tales. Greenberg's lush world building, captivating storytelling, and idiosyncratic artwork will easily entrance fans of literary graphic novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)