Anya is about to change into a Moth Keeper, a guardian tasked with defending the Moon-Moths. According to the lore in Anya’s desert village, the moths had been a present from the Moon-Spirit, who wished to indicate her gratitude for the villagers’ option to forswear daylight. Instead, they stay their waking hours at evening so the Moon-Spirit doesn’t must be alone. Every yr, the luminous Moon-Moths pollinate the Night-Flower tree, which the village depends on to thrive.
At first, Anya is satisfied that caring for the moths will hold her “warm inside even on long, cold nights,” however the temptation of daylight chips away at her resolve. When the solitude and darkness change into an excessive amount of, Anya comes to a decision with penalties that ripple throughout the desert and historical past itself. In The Moth Keeper, Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Ok. O’Neill portrays how isolation can break even the strongest will, however a supportive neighborhood can mend all rifts.
O’Neill (The Tea Dragon Society, Aquicorn Cove) has established themself as an exceptional graphic novel creator for center grade audiences. Their work usually explores themes of neighborhood and the pure world, and The Moth Keeper isn’t any exception. In one scene, Anya’s good friend Estell tells her concerning the important function that the Night-Flower tree’s pollen performs within the desert: “That’s the magic of it—it’s part of the rhythm of nature. Everything is connected.”
In their signature model, O’Neill’s comfortable, mild art work invitations readers right into a fantasy world dominated by each shade of blue and yellow. O’Neill performs subtly with graphics conventions to nice impact. By eliminating the gutter when folktales are being instructed, as an illustration, they convey the larger-than-life significance of the tales to the village’s tradition. Similarly, double-page spreads of the huge, rolling desert panorama seize “the smallness one feels standing amid such scenery,” as O’Neill explains in an afterword.
O’Neill’s books have a singular high quality that makes them tough to match to anybody else’s work, apart from their very own. Although its world constructing isn’t fairly as wealthy as within the Tea Dragon sequence and the character improvement not as deep as in Aquicorn Cove, The Moth Keeper continues to be an enthralling story that may delight O’Neill’s followers and new readers alike, drawing them in like Moon-Moths to a lantern.
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