‘Mercy Thompson: Homecoming’ review
By Brittney MacDonald, Columnist
2/5
The Mercy book series by Patricia Briggs captured readers with its amazing writing and fantasy world. Mercy Thompson: Homecoming, a graphic novel prequel to the series, offers stunning artwork but fails to capture the quality of writing that made the book series a New York Times’ bestseller. While it may look attractive, this graphic novel won’t hold your interest because it mostly revisits previous events that were mentioned in the book series.
Homecoming follows Mercy Thompson, a shapeshifter who grew up in a pack of werewolves, as she moves to the Tri-Cities in hopes of finding a new job as a history teacher. Things turn sour when she finds herself in the middle of a turf war between two warring werewolf packs, both intent on taking control of the territory.
The art by Francis Tsai and Amelia Woo is probably the one redeeming quality of this graphic novel. To put it simply, it’s beautiful. With vivid backgrounds and an earthy palette, the art conveys the very organic feel of the characters and story extremely well. The style is more typical of the modern North American works, with less emphasis on inks and more on making the panels appear like miniature paintings.
The problem with this graphic novel lies in the writing, which is done by series author Briggs. Intended to be a prequel, Homecoming features a plot that doesn’t appear in the original book series. It also features a lot of Mercy’s past that was already mentioned in the series, so for fans of the books this story seems like déjà vu.
Unfortunately, not enough about this urban fantasy world is explained in Homecoming for new readers to understand it without having read at least the first book, Moon Called.
My best advice is to skip Mercy Thompson: Homecoming and read the books instead.
