PopSyndicate.com

Fairies in the normal world. It’s not a new concept, not to the teen market, not to comics, and definitely not to Spiderwick Chronicles co-creator Holly Black (who also authored the popular teen series Tithe, Valient and Ironside). Now, in her new series The Good Neighbors, Holly Black takes the down the rabbit hole story arc to a new character, Rue.

Pronounced like kangaroo, Rue is a young high school girl in turmoil. Her mother has vanished, and father barely speaks to her. She’s a part of a rag-tag group of outcast-as-cool-kids, and wears her combats everywhere she goes – which includes urban rock climbing, or to her boyfriend’s band performances.

But of course, not everything can stay this way. Rue’s life get’s kicked around when a murder investigation targets her father as a potential perp. Suddenly, mysterious relatives of her mother’s begin to show up, trying to lure Rue away from her father, and that’s when the secret comes out – Rue is, like her mother, a fairy.

The mystery begins, and it’s up to Rue to figure out if her father is innocent, and if so, how to prove it? Her missing mother comes into play here too – what exactly happened to her mother? And what’s the deal with these new ‘relatives’?

Ted Naifeh provides the artwork for this graphic novel. It’s a little less polished than his stellar art on the Courtney Crumrin series, but not, by any means, bad. Every character is sharply drawn, full of angles and angry lines. The same detail is given to the bizarrely beautiful elves as the hum-drum humans, and the backgrounds are beautifully rendered and engrossing.

The plot is great, though not phenomenal, and nowhere near as addictive as Holly Black’s other fairy series. It is a nice introduction to a new look on her fairy world, and definitely worth checking out.

3