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A review by jnikolova
The Woods, Vol. 1: The Arrow by James Tynion IV
2.0
Also available on the WondrousBooks blog.
Has it ever happened to you to meet a cool person, funny, interesting, attractive, etc., then go out with them and they become instantly batshit crazy? Say, you go on one date and next thing you know that person is texting you every 20 seconds to check where you are and with who and so on?
Yeah, the odd, unsettling feeling of that is kind of what I felt with The Woods. So you have this volume about an entire school suddenly transferred to another planet/moon, whatever it is, and they need to figure out what to do next. The drawings are pretty enough, the cast is diverse, the premise is interesting...
...and within a day from arriving in this alien land, the teachers have turned evil, the kids are going all Lord of Flies on each other, some have become almost religiously mad, while others go from zero to Rambo in a couple of hours. It's mad and not exactly in a good way.
What's more, all of the younger characters are absolutely insufferable. It's a completely true cliche that teenagers believe they are the center of the world, but the author really overdid it in The Woods. One of the characters starts planning a revolution in the school because she thinks the headmaster is not taking the food and toilet issue seriously enough. A revolution! Her words. Another character saw a drawing of a man hunting a deer and had a poetic meltdown of like 10 bubbles of nonsensical blabber about how her dad bought her a rifle but she couldn't kill the deer and it changed her entire life and is she real and what's the meaning of it all...
Curious as I am to figure out how and why this high school was transported to space, I'm not going to force myself to read any more about these characters and their entirely waaay to overdramatic crap.
Has it ever happened to you to meet a cool person, funny, interesting, attractive, etc., then go out with them and they become instantly batshit crazy? Say, you go on one date and next thing you know that person is texting you every 20 seconds to check where you are and with who and so on?
Yeah, the odd, unsettling feeling of that is kind of what I felt with The Woods. So you have this volume about an entire school suddenly transferred to another planet/moon, whatever it is, and they need to figure out what to do next. The drawings are pretty enough, the cast is diverse, the premise is interesting...
...and within a day from arriving in this alien land, the teachers have turned evil, the kids are going all Lord of Flies on each other, some have become almost religiously mad, while others go from zero to Rambo in a couple of hours. It's mad and not exactly in a good way.
What's more, all of the younger characters are absolutely insufferable. It's a completely true cliche that teenagers believe they are the center of the world, but the author really overdid it in The Woods. One of the characters starts planning a revolution in the school because she thinks the headmaster is not taking the food and toilet issue seriously enough. A revolution! Her words. Another character saw a drawing of a man hunting a deer and had a poetic meltdown of like 10 bubbles of nonsensical blabber about how her dad bought her a rifle but she couldn't kill the deer and it changed her entire life and is she real and what's the meaning of it all...
Curious as I am to figure out how and why this high school was transported to space, I'm not going to force myself to read any more about these characters and their entirely waaay to overdramatic crap.