The Good Neighbors Book One: Kin by Holly Black

Summary: Rue Silver's mother has disappeared . . . and her father has been arrested, suspected of killing her. But it's not as straightforward as that. Because Rue is a faerie, like her mother was. And her father didn't kill her mother -- instead, he broke a promise to Rue's faerie king grandfather, which caused Rue's mother to be flung back to the faerie world. Now Rue must go to save her -- and must also defeat a dark faerie that threatens our very mortal world.

Summary taken from Goodreads.com

Generally I stay away from the teen graphic novels because they just don't seem to live up to my expectations. However, last weekend despite my previous let downs I borrowed several teen graphic novels. This happened to be one of them.

Now I've never read any of Holly Black's other works, but I have heard very mixed reviews but the general consensus has seemed to be that she's an "alright" author. Not good and not bad but smack dab in the middle.

I was hoping that I would be in the minority of those who enjoyed her work a lot. Unfortunately, I was smack dab in the middle. Maybe it's because this was a graphic novel and not a novel who knows. I suppose I will have to give one of her novels a try by borrowing it from the library.

I found the writing to be weak. The character building was poorly done. It seems as if Black was trying to make the main character Rue seem way too emo for my tastes. The girl sees faeries. That doesn't mean that she has to be EMO just because she sees things that others cannot. Black just tried to hard to build her characters which in my opinion fell flat.

I felt that the story fell flat. It was like half the story was missing. I understand that she wanted to leave some things unsaid in order to carry on to the second and third books in The Good Neighbors Trilogy.

I did however like the art in this graphic novel. It was well done and I found it to be the main saving grace of the entire work. It is because of the art that I boosted the rating up from 2 stars to 2.5

I would recommend this graphic novels to people who like YA, Graphic Novels and Faeries...so I'd basically recommend it to most teenage girls. I do plan on reading the rest of the Trilogy in hopes that this was just a weak start since I already have them out from the series.