To be honest, Gumshoe: A Graphic Novel by Brenna Thummler, didn’t “do it” for me as I had hoped. Thummler’s books Anne of Green Gables A Graphic Novel, Sheets, Lights, and Delicates were good, but sometimes you don’t hit a homerun with an author you’ve enjoyed.
With that said, ages at least 10 and up, but more likely 12 and up, will have a blast. We have Willa, a young girl with social anxiety, who runs away from home and meets up with a gang of mail thieves. The girls are all runaways, they pattern themselves after a “famous” mail thief, Two Gum Tilly, they have their Fagan-themed adult who is working for the Mail Company, and they are convinced are helping keep the mail safe (cards, which usually have money in them for birthdays, holidays, and the like) from that real outlaw, Two Gum Tilly (which nobody stops and considered is a character in a 80 year old story about a kid outlaw who steals cards because she never got any, as a kid, for her birthday one year). Okay, so they are not the um… brightest stick in the pack of chewing gum, as it’s pretty obvious who the real TGT is, but hey that’s half the fun of reading. And it’s interesting to see how the plot unfolds.
But that’s it. It wasn’t making me say “Saddle up cowpokes! We gotta get along little doggies and read this quickly.” It was typical of the author’s (who is also the illustrator) work, simple images that use basic colors to move the themes along and set the scene and mood. It is decent, okay, and that’s fine. If you like girls coming of age stories, this is the one you might want to look into.
