Reina del Universo (Queen of the World!: Babymouse Series #1) Book

I guess I should be honest and state that if this book had not been chosen as one of our monthly reads in the Children's Literature Group for last February (we were discussing two graphic novels), I would NEVER have chosen Jennifer L. Holm's Queen of the World for myself (and no, I will of course also not be bothering with any of the Babymouse sequels either).

For while I can to a very small extent appreciate the themes presented in Queen of the World and do enjoy the often clever intertextuality (featuring fairy tales, science fiction and the like), I really do NOT AT ALL find Matthew Holm's illustrations visually appealing and actually consider them rather massively annoying and aesthetically grating. Thus any and all potential and actual reading pleasure with regard to Babymouse's antics and friendship struggles very quickly started to majorly wane, as indeed, I felt continuously distracted by both the annoying graphics and the general lack of text in Queen of the World, and was therefore constantly missing and then searching for (in fact rather essential) narrative information (information that was often hidden in the illustrations and thus hard for me to grasp and fully comprehend).

I just cannot seem to really warm up to graphic novels (and since I almost always think in words, in text, and not in pictures, too much of the latter usually tends to both vex and confound me). Now I actually did manage to finish Queen of the World, but I do remain profoundly unsatisfied and more and more convinced that most graphic novels, while appealing to many, most definitely are NOT so much for me (and I guess the fact that I have never much liked stories featuring anthropomorphic mice does not much help either, as the entire scenario of a weirdly illustrated murine main protagonist named Babymouse is just not at all my cup of reading tea). .