Glass Town

by Isabel Greenberg

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 224
Rating:

Synopsis:

Glass Town is an original graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg that encompasses the eccentric childhoods of the four Bront. children--Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. The story begins in 1825, with the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest siblings. It is in response to this loss that the four remaining Bront. children set pen to paper and created the fictional world that became known as Glass Town. This world and its cast of characters would come to be the Bront s' escape from the realities of their lives. Within Glass Town the siblings experienced love, friendship, war, triumph, and heartbreak. Through a combination of quotes from the stories originally penned by the Bront s, biographical information about them, and Greenberg's vivid comic book illustrations, readers will find themselves enraptured by this fascinating imaginary world.

I’m not a huge fan of Isabel Greenberg’s art, maybe because I’m not a very visual person and thus I sometimes found it hard to parse when it got extra scribbly, and to identify characters, etc. I don’t love the lettering, either. It’s fun to play in the world of the Brontës and their juvenilia, but it kinda wore out its welcome for me, I guess?

In the end, it didn’t really feel like it told a full, satisfying story about either Charlotte Brontë or Glasstown etc. In part that’s because life is like that, and the Brontës caught a pretty rough deal, but… I didn’t really feel the transition from fantasy to reality was a great climax, and I’d almost have been more interested to see Charlotte vanish into her fantasy world and find a better ending.

I will say that though I don’t like the art style, it is very expressive and captures body language and expressions really well at times.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)