By Roger Leloup
Publisher: Cinebook
ISBN: 978-1-460-56-4
At first glance this looks like a book intended for a female readership, which reminded me of a comic strip art course I attended back when I'd just left school. The teacher wanted to compare girls' comics to boys' comics, so he started off by showing us lots of dynamic movement and action in the boys' comics which was pretty much the staple of my comic reading anyway and no surprises there. Then he showed us the girls' comics which was lots of talking. Standing around and talking. Page after page. To be fair, this wasn't aimed at me, but it all seemed so terribly dull. In order to give the artists some movement to draw the recurring theme was to involve the talking taking place while the girls climbed and descended stairs (but often with one of them remaining at the foot). So it would be fair to say that I approached The Prey And The Ghost expecting much of the same.
And how wrong was I. The book does fall into Cinebook's children's category, but to say it was exclusively for girls just because it has a heroine would be grossly unfair. This particular tale follows Yoko, a Japanese electrical engineer, in Scotland where she ends up at the obligatory Scottish castle only to become entangled with an orphan's struggle with her step-father and the appearance of a ghost. It's got adventure, the supernatural, and plenty of devious goings on, and the character of Yoko is a refreshingly positive one. This is certainly a book that has action as well as a sensitive side, not exactly The Famous Five but not a million-miles away either. I asked my daughter (9) to read it and she loved it, and my son (7) thought it was scary but exciting. The other books in the series look as if they have a similar good mix of what would appeal to both genders so I'll certainly be taking a look.
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