Rain
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed writer/historian Mary M Talbot and graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot comes Rain, a chronicle of the growing relationship of two young women, one an environmental activist, set against the backdrop of the disastrous 2015 floods in northern England.
The wild Brontë moorlands are being criminally mismanaged as crops are being poisoned, and birds and animals are being slaughtered. While the characters are fictional, the tragedy is shockingly real.
Rain is the fourth graphic-novel collaboration between Mary M Talbot and husband Bryan Talbot, a partnership that has produced the award winning Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (with Kate Charlesworth), and The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Talbots (The Red Virgin and the Vison of Utopia) set a didactic fictional romance amid the real-life floods that devastated the United Kingdom in 2015. While the scholarly, eco-friendly heart of their effort is in the right place, what's meant to be an ecological thriller crams in so much data and fact-filled dialogue that it reads like a public service announcement. Londoner Cath is in a strained long-distance relationship with her organic-obsessed girlfriend Mitch, an organizer of a grassroots campaign to protect local marshy bog-land in Yorkshire. The link between the health of the land and the health of its people is direct, as a tree-planting friend of Mitch's tells Cath: "Saving the planet? I prefer to think of it as saving grandchildren." Cath and Mitch bicker over eco-friendliness issues, with Cath suggesting her girlfriend simply move out of a flood-hazard zone. "What, move to the top of a hill and buy a boat?" Mitch retorts. "It's not just one place, it's global. And it's about to get a lot worse." Bryan Talbot's detailed portraits of Yorkshire's people and wind-hewn landscape paint a lovely, empathetic picture of a place in danger of destruction. Unfortunately, the story itself is a slog and delves with more emotional intensity into the impacts of pesticides on soil health than into the inner lives of the characters.
