When a tragic accident takes the life of seventeen-year-old Raven Roth’s foster mom–and Raven’s memory–she moves to New Orleans to live with her foster mother’s family and finish her senior year of high school.Starting over isn’t easy. Raven remembers how to solve math equations and make pasta, but she can’t remember her favorite song or who she was before the accident. When strange things … things start happening–impossible things–Raven starts to think it might be better not to know who she was in her previous life.
But as she grows closer to her foster sister, Max, her new friends, and Tommy Torres, a guy who accepts her for who she is now, Raven has to decide if she’s ready to face what’s buried in the past…and the darkness building inside her.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Beautiful Creatures Kami Garcia, and artist Gabriel Picolo, comes this first graphic novel in the Teen Titans series for DC Ink, Teen Titans: Raven.
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Actual rating 4.5.
I really enjoyed this retelling of the Raven story from Teen Titans. I really like the art style and the color scheme used. The mostly black and white and purple scheme really helped set the tone while splashes of other colors here and there helped to emphasize important or critical elements as needed.
This is very much a Gen Z take on a character that, I believe, became really popular in early 2000 with the release of the Teen Titans animated series. The Raven depicted then was very much a new millennial take on the character and that has clearly influenced each rendition of her since.
This book also very much a YA presentation of this character’s story. Since Teen Titans are a group of teenage superheroes, it makes sense their story be told from a teen perspective, as opposed to an adult perspective trying to relate to teens. With that said, I admit YA is not the strongest genre for me to enjoy, and yet I did enjoy this.
I think this version of Raven’s origin speaks to me for many reasons that may turn away other readers. I like the diversity of the supporting characters (totally love Max) and enjoy the slow build into the world of the supernatural. It would be easy to write a story about Raven and immediately jump into powers and abilities, but I like that this lets the reader discover them with her.
The high school banter was a bit annoying at times, but I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be. I did like that some of the high school cliches felt a kind of original- I mean every teen story has a mean girl but at least this wasn’t portrayed as the perfect girl everyone loves and wants to be or be with. Then there are the standard prom shenanigans and teen betrayal subplot. Still, not bad in the overall scheme of things.
What can I say? If you don’t think too hard about things and try something a little new and different with an open mind, you may just enjoy it.
Highly recommended to fans of YA supernatural stories and D.C. comics.
While to graphics are beautiful and the message is nice there really isn’t much to thus story until about 75% in and even the its only a few pages of “action” then the story ends in a semi cliffhanger. There was too much high school antics, too little superhero story line and it was severely lacking on details. It read to me like an outline of a story. I did like all the girl/woman power and the supernatural Voodoo aspects but overall the story is just not there.
Its so cool
This didn’t blow my mind by any means but I did enjoy it. There were some parts where the pacing felt a little too fast in the story. A lot of the story felt very juvenile to me but this is a young adult graphic novel so that is the target audience. I liked the voodoo aspects and I liked seeing Deathstroke. Some of the characters didn’t feel as fleshed out as I would have liked. I really enjoyed the style of the illustrations in this. They really fit with the overall feel of the story. Overall, this is an enjoyable origin story for Raven that is perfect for young readers. I am definitely curious about the next story which features Beast Boy.