The City on the Other Side

March 15, 2018
An affluent, sheltered girl embarks on an adventure to bring peace to a realm of fairies besieged by war.With her emotionally distant mother in Europe, young Isabel travels to the country to spend a lonesome summer with her equally distant artist father, away from "filthy" San Francisco. One fateful night she inadvertently slips through the Veil into the fairy world and acquires a powerful magical necklace. Suddenly, Isabel finds herself in the middle of a war between the Seelie and the Unseelie. With the Unseelie inching closer to total domination, Isabel must return to the fairy side of San Francisco and find the missing Seelie princess while escaping the wrath of the power-hungry Prince Coscar, leader of the Unseelie. Set in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the narrative glides at a brisk pace, never veering from its adventure plot. The historical backdrop adds a thin layer of tragedy to the story, but the author leaves this subtext somewhat unexplored in favor of delightful secondary characters. As Isabel clashes with both Seelie and Unseelie fairies, she teams up with a spunky sentient mushroom named Button and Benjie, a Filipino orphan. Featuring a diverse cast of humans (brown-skinned Isabel and her family seem to be Latinx) and fairies, Robinson's colorful, dynamic artwork crackles with spirited fun and portrays San Francisco and its fairy-realm equivalent in broad, evocative panels. A brief, graphic history of San Francisco follows the story.A worthwhile peek into the world of fairies, with poignant hints of fancy. (Graphic fantasy. 8-12)

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June 18, 2018
Isabel, the cosseted daughter of a San Francisco socialite, comes into possession of a magical necklace with a jewel-like heart that shields her from harm. It belongs to Seelie fairy princess Id’naress, and Isabel agrees to help return it before it falls into the hands of the evil Coscar, an Unseelie prince. As she and her sidekick, Benjie, evade one capture attempt after another, Isabel breaks free of her sheltered upbringing. Turn-of-the-20th-century San Francisco is reimagined as a city with a double existence—human civilization and fairy realm—while the 1906 earthquake functions as fallout from the fairy war. Swirling, Art Deco–flavored artwork by Robinson (The Civil War Handbook) offers a wealth of fairy splendor. Scott (Science Comics: Robots and Drones: Past, Present, and Future) crafts a story that operates smoothly and stays taut, though fairy characters lean to the archetypal, from the sneering Coscar (“Give it to me or be destroyed”) to the noble Id’naress (“This war was not my desire”). There’s freshness in the nonwhite main roles—Isabel is Latina and Benjie is Filipino—though the focus stays on the book’s fantasy rather than on culture. Ages 8–12.

July 1, 2018
In this richly colored graphic novel, sheltered yet neglected Isabel, a high-society Latinx girl in post1906 earthquake San Francisco, becomes embroiled in a fairy war. Separated by the "Veil," the fantastical fairy realm overlays the drabber human world, and the illustrations fluctuate smoothly between the historical and whimsical settings. Dynamic angles and varied, harshly bordered panels maintain the story's urgent pace.

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)