From Booklist
The brevity and recycled nature of current fantasy supernova Gaiman's new book at first suggests he's milking the old cow pretty hard. Its two stories are adaptations of prose-only versions in
Smoke and Mirrors (1998), in which they weren't the most memorable entries. And only 48 pages? Fortunately, the artwork quashes all kvetching. Zulli mixes the precision of pen-and-ink and the lushness of full-spectrum watercolor to produce one glowingly lovely panel after another. The full- and two-page single images are big beauties suitable, as they say, for framing. Note, in particular, the two-page transition between the prologue (an interior scene) to the narrative proper (an exterior) in "The Daughter of Owls." It's ravishing, though not as intensely colored as many other panels, especially in "The Price," which gives the lie to those who sneer at the idea of a guard cat. Oh, there is one odd scene in "Daughter" in which the story vaults alarmingly from seventeenth-century England to . . . Solomonic Jerusalem, isn't it? Even that looks marvelous.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
Newly rewritten by Gaiman for this graphic novel, these two ominous stories from the author's award-winning prose, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, feature animals and people not being quite what they seem. In "The Price," a black cat like a small panther arrives at a country home and is soon beset by mysterious and vicious wounds. What is he fighting every night that could do this, and why does he persist? "The Daughter of Owls" recounts an eerie old tale of a foundling girl who was left - with an owl pellet - as a newborn on the steps of the Dymton Church. She was soon cloistered away in a local convent, but by her fourteenth year word of her beauty had spread - and those who would prey upon her faced unforeseen consequences.