Review: Djeliya

Djeliya: A West African Fantasy Epic by Juni Ba
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

A graphically striking and thoughtful reworking of West African myths and stories to tell a story of power and community responsibility, innovation and tradition, greed and humility, all circling around the importance of storytelling itself. Awa might be the advisor to the prince, but sure OSS the heart of this story, and the one who connects everyone and everything, for better or worse. I especially loved seeing the stories from her childhood with the djinnie, before things got bad.

The powerful the art style and coloring m in this book is especially appealing - the dynamism really helps draw you into the story. I can definitely see many of these pages as frame-able art. I also really appreciated how layered things were, like the different symbols that you could track throughout the story. Speaking of those, I really appreciated the index of symbols and stories the author included in the back. It gave me a lot more context to the story and also more things to look for on a reread.

The one issue I had is that the art was so chaotic at times that I had a hard time following what was going on. Sometimes I couldn’t tell the characters apart, and the action was so frequent I couldn’t always keep track of who was doing what. I actually read through a few sections twice because I was getting lost. I don’t think that’s a sufficient reason not to read this one, but figured I’d mention it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book for review purposes.

View all my reviews