Daily Graphic Novel Recommendation 154

Wandering Island

by Kenji Tsuruta, translation by Dana Lewis, lettering by Susie Lee and Betty Dong
Genre notes: adventure, coastal life, lost city
200 pages
ISBN: 1506700799 (Amazon)

This book's cover is truth in advertising in a way. Wandering Island definitely features both a) a perhaps-too-lanky young woman in a bikini and b) her aeroplane. It's definitely got much more going on (otherwise I wouldn't likely be recommending it), but the bikini woman and the plane are both inescapable constants.

Wandering Island feels kind of like an adaptation of Miyazaki's Castle In The Sky. Mikura Amelia is a letter-carrier pilot in a chain of hundreds of small islands off the Pacific-facing coast of Japan. She loses her grandfather but discovers his quest to find Electric Island, an apparently mobile island city. Wandering Island is about loss, obsession, and finding a purpose. There's also a cat. And Tsuruta's illustrations are lovely and remind me a bit of Daisuke Igarashi's.

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