Book Review
Title: Queen of Kenosha
Author: Howard Shapiro & Erica Chan
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: ***
Review: So, Queen of Kenosha is a coming of age tale, that is also the first installment of the Thin Thinline Trilogy, that follows the fiercely independent Nina Overstreet who has an axe to grind. A talented singer-songwriter slogging her way through the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk music scene of 1963, the Queen of Kenosha, Wisconsin, realises that standing on the cusp of stardom gets her little respect and barely a cup of coffee in New York City.
One night while playing a gig Nina meets a man named Jimmy and when she tries to return his wallet which she left at the bar Nina is attacked and knocked unconscious by a mysterious woman. We soon learn that “Jimmy” is actually Nick Ladd, a government operative, who works gathering intel and arrested a rogue band of Nazis who can to the USA before the end of World War II. Seeing that Nina has some skill Nick asks to recruit her into their organisation as she would be unknown to the people they are tracking and her career as a singer is the perfect cover for having to travel a lot.
2 and a half months after joining the government agency Nina and now on a similar level as all the other agents, but she is still seen by some as a second-class citizen because she is a woman. I did have a little bit of problem with the sexist comments made by some of the characters, but context is key given this is set in the early ’60s when this type of attitude was still very common. Another month goes by before Nina goes on her first assignment and it a massive flop. They catch two Nazis, but Nick has been ordered to kill them which Nina refuses to do and it turns out that she was right. Their inside man informs them they were more valuable alive because they held a wealth of information, but the fault is pinned on Nina rather than the man who ordered their deaths.
Over the course of the story, Nina is faced with a lot of moral decisions and has to make a lot of moral compromises on her part while dealing with bigoted, sexist and racist comments from the men around her but Nick does provide some comfort to her. As she is drawn further and further into a world where everyone walks the line between right and wrong and Nina is struggling between sticking with the decision she made or calling it quits altogether.
In the end, I found the story to be compelling, the artwork is beautiful but there are two things I had issues with, the first is Nina and Nick’s relationship, it is set up as romantic but never gets that far and I felt certain plot points would have had a greater impact if the pair had a romantic relationship. The second is the sexist comments, now I know it is meant to highlight the society at the time the story is set and give some conflict between the characters but there is so many of them it kind of put me off the story a little and apart from the ending I don’t really see where the story can go from here but I will be picking up volume 2 to find out what happened to Nina.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
I received this review copy from NetGalley.
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