The Nameless City

In preparation for landing here, I’ve prepared a couple of posts in advance. Needing to catch up on my reading challenge (It's April already?), I went for challenge #6 – read an all-ages comic.

Using this handy list, I found The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks (color by Jordie Bellaire). Volume one follows the adventures of Kai, a young Dao fighter-in-training. In the first pages of the book, Kai meets his father, a higher up in the army, for the first time. Having been raised by his mother outside the city, Kai is eager to reunite with his father who decides to show him around the city. After one taste of city life, Kai is in love. Eager to find more meat on a stick, he returns the next day on his own and meets city dweller (and orphan) Rat. Impressed by Rat’s running skills, Kai returns morning after morning, bearing baskets of food in exchange, to learn her tricks. In the meantime, a plot is unfolding to assassinate the current leaders. With Rat and Kai’s help, the plot is …well, you’ll just have to read the book.

Hicks’ drawings contrast the austerity of the palace training, the grit of the city, and the tranquility of the monk’s enclave. Younger readers will appreciate the action scenes and marvel at Rat’s leaps across the city’s rooftops. Older readers will appreciate the allusions to the fragile balance between war and peace and the arbitrary nature of language when it comes to ownership and power.