'Niki de Saint Phalle: The Garden of Secrets' by Dominique Osuch and Sandrine Martin is a graphic novel biography of an artist known for creating large, strange sculptures.

The story tells the life Niki de Saint Phalle. There are some early traumatizing events in her life that she had to learn to deal with. She did through a feminist style of art. She worked in many mediums, but is best known for sculptures. The book is told as a series of journal entries and color is used sparsely in the beginning of the story and saturates more later in the work.

I wanted to like this more than I did, but the font choices felt cramped and made reading it difficult. I also feel like the art was kind of crude and didn't really do proper homage to this artist's works. There is a nice timeline of the artist with more information in the back of the book.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from NBM Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

The subject of this graphic book is fascinating but this book unfortunately does not convey this. The book has a few problems. The font on the writing is hard to read. The story jumps around and is disjointed and it can be hard to follow. The book will however inspire you to find out more the artist and there is a bibliography in the back to help.

I didn’t really enjoy this graphic novel as much as I thought I would. The cursive writing was very hard to read, the plot line jumps from one event to the next in less than two pages (which became confusing), and the narrative itself wasn’t… good? It felt like it had been written by someone who hadn’t been writing for long.

However, it’s really informative, very fast paced, and easy to read, so the experience wasn’t worthless.

I received access to this title via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'd never heard of Niki de Saint Phalle prior to reading this graphic novel, but her monumental sculptures remind me quite a bit of a friend's work. The font choice here makes the background information a bit difficult to read, though the speech bubbles are easier going. de Saint Phalle had a fascinating life and career and this was a pleasant way to learn about her and her life. The suggested reading at the book's end definitely warrants investigation, however, since the drawings of her works don't quite capture them the same way photographs do.

Dumped this one through (a) hard to read font, (b) pretention, (c) corrupt pages due to netgalley still not correcting adobe digital bug that they've had since November and done jack about. But mostly for (b).