Giantess - J.C. Deveney

Author: J.C. Deveney

Illustrator: Núria Tanarit

Genre: Graphic Novel

Rating: 2 stars.

Hello from Outlierland once again! L This simply didn’t match up to that exquisite cover.

A farmer finds a giant baby girl in a forest. As he and his wife have six sons and no daughters, they adopt her and name her Celeste. Celeste lives a sheltered life with her brothers for many years. But after they venture onto their separate career paths, Celeste’s true life journey begins. As she traverses new places and meets new people, she comes to an understanding of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world and she learns through mistakes and mishaps how she can finally make a place for herself and be what she wants to be.

This doesn’t flow like a typical giant story. While Celeste is the only giantess in the entire book, her size plays only a minor role in the plot. Her femininity and her self-acceptance gets the major focus. In a way, this is good as Celeste is treated almost as a normal character. But this also leads to several exaggerations, some of which border on the bizarre. Moreover, Celeste spends most of her life being a character whose direction is decided by others. Sometimes, this came across as genuine; at other times, it was too silly and I couldn’t understand why a powerful giantess didn’t use her size and strength (both of which she was aware of) to escape from her troubles.

The plot takes Celeste from naïve beginnings, through adventures with people of all classes ranging from princes and knights to peddlers and travelling troupes, to even a ‘witch’ who isn’t a witch and manipulative sirens on an island. Each chapter contains one encounter that impacts Celeste’s life path. Thus the plot feels like an episodic journey from one situation & place to the next. It is here where the book disappointed me the most. The chapters are almost isolated compartments with there being only a minuscule impact of the events of one on the proceedings of the next. This makes the narrative structure feel jumpy and disconnected. After the midway mark, I was just bored with the illogical flow. The ending is decent but not exceptional.

The plot development also left a lot to be desired. I would have loved to know more about Celeste’s origins. Where were her parents? How did she land in the forest as a baby? Did she ever look for them? The narrative leaves this thread untouched. The character development of some secondary characters is pretty random. They come and go and act as per the whims of the author, with no pattern to their behaviour. Because the story is set in the medieval era, the inconsistencies become even more visible as there’s way some of the men would have acted that way in that era.

The illustrations also did nothing for me, which is really sad because great sketches can help save a graphic novel to some extent. The nature and village scenes are drawn well. But the human figures are too cartoonish and disproportional at times. Many of the male characters look the same, with only the speech bubbles helping in identifying them. Celeste’s size keeps changing as per the size of the panel, and she simply doesn’t seem to age after a certain point.

If you read this mainly as a combinations of the three Fs – fantasy, fable, feminism, you might like it more than I did. I felt it went all over the place and would have worked better with a more organised storytelling approach.

Mine is an outlier review so please look through other opinions before you make up your mind about this graphic novel.

My thanks to Diamond Book Distributors, Magnetic Press, and NetGalley for the DRC of “Giantess”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Note: There is some cartoonish nudity but nothing is sexualised.