Bone, by Jeff Smith
One year in elementary school, while wandering a Scholastic Book Fair— that budding bookworm’s delight—I found a graphic novel called Out From Boneville. The book’s cover featured a cute, simply drawn white figure, something like a combination of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Moomin. I bought it, not suspecting the journey that awaited me.
The Bone series, comprising nine books largely self-published by Smith, is high fantasy masquerading as kid lit. It’s also hilarious.
Cousins Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone explore the mysterious Valley, encountering dragons, “rat creatures,” and the fierce Thorn and her Gran’ma Ben.
Out From Boneville is heavy on jokes and light on violence, but as I raced through the series, that balance flipped. By the finale, the Bones are caught in a war that’s politically complex, thrilling, and, for a kid, sometimes terrifying. (Smith has said that he meant for the comic to be a “kids’ book for adults.”) The story never loses its humor, though, which -combined with the masterful world-building and detailed pen-and-ink illustrations— makes Bone always worth revisiting.
– Dan Goff, copy editor
