The Well
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A 2023 YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens Selection
A fantasy graphic novel about Lizzy, a girl who gets cursed by a wishing well, and her adventure to grant three wishes in order to break free.
Li-Zhen’s life on the archipelago is simple. Known to friends and family as Lizzy, she takes care of her grandfather and their goats, she flirts with the woman who helps row the ferry, and she stays away from the fog that comes in the night—and the monsters hiding within it.
But Lizzy’s life comes apart when she steals a handful of coins from a sacred well to cover a debt. The well requires repayment, but it doesn’t deal in coins. It needs wishes, and its minions will drown Lizzy in its depths if she doesn’t grant them. Lizzy finds herself on a quest to uncover hidden memories, bestow great wealth, and face the magical secrets that nearly destroyed her family—and are now returning to threaten everything she has ever known.
In this breathtaking graphic novel, Jake Wyatt and Choo have created a modern fable based on magic and family secrets, exploring the power—and limits—of wishes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A farmer's teenage granddaughter embarks on a perilous journey to break her curse in this Chinese-inspired heroic myth. Li-zhen is three coins short to pay the fare back home after a laborious day selling her and her grandfather's wares at the market. Desperate, she steals from the village's wishing well, which curses her. To remove her affliction, Lizzy must fulfill the wish of each person whose coin she stole, lest the ocean consume her in recompense. With the well's mysterious, cloaked guardian as her guide, Lizzy is tasked with ferrying a stranger to a faraway land, helping a greedy man gain immeasurable wealth, and slaying the Leviathan—a monster she thought dead after her late witch mother felled it years before—that is terrorizing her island home of Shui Jing. Choo's thinly lined inks render intricately detailed characters, and pale-hued coloring and expertly prioritized negative space ground the expansive worldbuilding. Wyatt enlivens classic fantasy tropes and themes through the lens of a tenacious heroine whose rapidly expanding worldview and patchy memories of her complicated past build toward a poignant resolution through a compact, immersive narrative. Characters are portrayed with varying skin tones. Ages 14–up.
