Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss. ( )

It certainly takes a while to get used to Greenberg's handwriting (sometimes it's so small! Sometimes it's too curly!), but the art is clear and vivid.

But where's the plot? Is it really just Charlotte telling a figment of her imagination what happened a long time ago in Glass Town? This seems to require the reader to bring in a lot of context and knowledge with them to the reading, and I just didn't really care.

Valente's Glass Town Game is much better. ( )

I've long been intrigued by the life of the Brontës and know so little about their imaginative "Glass Town" years, so I was really excited about the concept of this graphic novel. While Glass Town displays considerably creativity, the illustrations--crude and geometric--didn't impress me. The story was confusing and didn't give me much insight into the Brontës' real Glass Town. There were metafictional elements present, a device that generally thrills me, but I was a bit indifferent with how they were orchestrated here. Glass Town is a book for graphic novel buffs and the most devoted Brontë junkies. ( )

I highly recommend that this book be read with (but after) the recent graphic novel, Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre, to get a fuller understanding of the childhood of the Brontës and the creation of the Glass Town shared universe.

This is a melancholy tale with suitably dark and rough art that uses loose adaptations of Glass Town stories to reflect rifts in the Brontë family and complex feelings amongst the siblings, especially those of Charlotte for her brother Branwell. It also probes a bit at the colonialism and imperialism of the British people as the conquered and enslaved natives of Angria attempt an uprising against their oppressors.

It's interesting to see how this all feeds into Jane Eyre, one of my all-time favorite novels. ( )