Sofia is a comic book series about a girl who loves to surf and who uploads a copy of herself to the cloud. I really enjoyed this first volume! The artwork was beautiful, with vibrant colours, a cute art style and extra texture to some of the panels to demarcate parts of the story that take place in the virtual world. The inclusion of songs was also a nice touch and I thought it was a great playlist. With regard to the story, I loved the concept of 'the internet falling apart' and the idea of living in a virtual sphere versus reality continues to fascinate me. However, there were definitely moments where I was quite confused as to what was going on. Some of my questions where eventually answered, but I'm asuming future volumes will address the others. Initially I also felt like I had to suspend my disbelief quite a bit (it almost seemed like the author was unaware that data in the cloud isn't something abstract but rather stored on physical servers), but pretty soon I was immersed in the story and it didn't bother me anymore. I'm definitely interested to see where this story will go.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a review copy.
A graphic novel about a boy who struggles at school but then meets a girl who helps him gets his grades up, and in turn he helps her get into her dream school despite her family believing that her disability might make that impossible.
The artwork was absolutely beautiful and the colours were lovely. I also really liked main character Victor, who struggled to remember the right facts and who often blurted out things in class. I got the impression that Victor might have ADHD, but the story never mentions this. Instead, he simply overcomes his struggles by studying hard with the aid of Marie-Jo. This solution seems a bit too easy, but as this story is based on the novel A Friend in the Dark, this is probably not the graphic novel's fault. I also felt like Marie-Jo's struggles became Victor's whole identity, which didn't seem very healthy. However, in the beginning the two of them were very cute together.