Published by TokyoPop
Slugline: Twin sisters realize that a private school deep the Australian outback has some drawbacks of the ghostly kind.
Another gothic tale, much more steeped in horror than my previous review of Bizenghast, the dreaming is focused on twin sisters Amber and Jeanie. After an undisclosed incident, they leave the city and move to a private school deep in the Australian bush with their aunt who, unhelpfully, immediately leaves on a long business trip. Attempts to fit into the school reveals that they should never mention they are twins, and they also discover a history of spookiness surrounding the school culminating in a tragedy that the reader could see coming.
While a ghost story doesn't need to give you all the answers, I feel that it was hard to pick out the story threads introduced and determine which ones were important. Either a lot is going to start tying together in the next volume, or there are going to be loose ends all over the place. There was a character introduced early in the volume, the only boy in the volume, who never appears again, but the way he was introduced made me feel that he was important in some way. So the story feels fractured.
The art is strong and well detailed, but since the main characters were twin sisters, I continually had to work to keep them separate. It was one of those no-win art challenges -- you need to keep them looking similar for story purposes, as twin sisters, but at the same time they need to look different so readers can tell them apart.
While enjoyable, I felt like I had to work to get that enjoyment, more than I should have to, but I was not put off enough to not at least want to check out the next volume.
- Ferdinand
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