For the book Nocturnos by Laura Perez and translator Andrea Rosenberg, I had to average out my rating. There are points for my gut reaction, points for my love of the art, and there are points for how I think others will feel about it. Therefore, my score is a 3.75. And that is a good representation of things as it is not for everyone, but there’s a lot to unpack so everyone might find something. It is literary. It is a dream within a dream within a dream. It all flows together. But what is real? What is not? Who is real? Who is not? You do not just read the text or the illustrations. You read it with your feelings.
This is a graphic novel, larger than a usual picture book, or you could say it is an art book. It is not what I expected from the cover. I thought it would be a fae creature going through the world, parallel to the human world and how humans are encroaching on nature. And that’s not exactly wrong, as there is a scene where a deer has been killed on the highway. I assume it was by a vehicle and probably one of the cars in the scene presented to us on the page.
But then there is the fact that the boy in the backseat of one car might be a man in another scene. Each page has things on it that somehow flows into another. So, are they connected or not? It is one big dream? Is someone at the start, middle or end dreaming? Or is it all reality happening before, during and after the scene is seen?
The point I felt was that you don’t know and you won’t know unless you read it yourself. But then again, maybe you won’t. You might be reading Rosenberg’s vision, but I think you can interpret it any way you want.
