From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
This book oozes talent. The complex and melancholy story about a young girl who gets swept up in a mystery that could tear her family apart pulled on my heartstrings and has stuck with me since the beginning of this year. Ferris's art is impeccable, bold, and impressed me with every turn of the page, and even more so after reading her backstory. I cried multiple times and haven't stopped talking about it with my coworkers all year (sorry everyone.) This is one of my top 5 favorite books ever. Recommended By Brianna B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazines iconography. Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge. Rendered in a kaleidoscopically and breathtakingly virtuosic visual style that combines panel sequences and montage, Emil Ferris’ draftsmanship echoes the drawing of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Robert Crumb. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a revelatory work of striking originality that has been lauded as the debut graphic novel of the year.
Review
"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris’s first graphic novel but also her first published work. ...Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form." New Yorker
Review
"No one has ever made a comic like Emil Ferris’s assured, superhumanly ambitious two-part debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters... it threatens not merely to exceed established standards of excellence, but to set new ones." The Guardian
Review
"Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time." Art Spiegelman
Review
"This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them." NPR: Fresh Air
Review
"Ms. Ferris’s blood-tingling debut graphic novel oozes with the secrets and hungers that shadow childhood. ...[Her] ferocious Expressionistic art, with its Crumb-like crosshatching, nails the grit-in-your-mouth feel of her home city." New York Times
About the Author
Emil Ferris grew up in Chicago during the turbulent 1960s, and is consequently a devotee of all things monstrous and horrific. She has an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. In a previous life, Ferris was an illustrator and toy sculptor for a diverse range of clients. In 2010, Ferris was made a Toby Devan Lewis Fellow in the Visual Arts. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is Emil's first, but not last, graphic novel.