Warnings: None
Positive Representation: POC character, Fat character, powerful women
Rating: 5/5 stars
Witchlight by Jessi Zabarsky is a beautiful graphic novel about a young woman helping a witch regain the half of her power that was stolen from her as a child. The world of the story is heavily populated with a wonderful variety of women including POC and queer characters with a variety of realistic body types and ages. One of the main protagonists herself is a queer, fat woman and the other is a queer POC woman.
The two protagonists, Lelek and Sanja, meet during a fight in a market involving a lovely mix of magic and sword fighting. Once they get to know one another they begin traveling the world searching for the witch who took Lelek’s magic from her. Along the way they encounter a wide variety of other witches and general people, some who help them and some who don’t. Everything is going their way during their adventures, until suddenly it all goes wrong when someone Sanja hasn’t seen since she left with Lelek comes back into her life.
The book has a unique element of differentiating witches by giving them a candle floating over their heads. It was a lovely touch, especially because of Zabarsky’s ability to make sure the gesture and movement of the candle perfectly matched the gesture and movement of the witch it belonged to. The art in general was simple but not overly so; it gave you exactly the amount of information you needed to enjoy the story without getting bogged down. Zabarsky’s expressions on her characters followed this same line of complimenting the story without distracting from it.
This was a lovely graphic novel and I can’t recommend it enough. A wonderful story, wonderful art, and wonderful representation. Go pick it up, then come back and tell me what you thought!
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