Thank you to NetGalley, Europe Comics, and Sylvain Savoia for a copy of the comic to review. As always, an honest review.

I read the entire graphic novel in a day. By nature, they're not too long, but since I hadn't heard about Tromelin before I absolutely had to find out what happened to all the slaves shipwrecked on the island.

I'm not a huge fan of graphic novels and comics, because most of them are based on superheroes. Not my thing! However, when I saw this one I knew I had to read it. I first noticed the illustrations. They're gorgeous, detailed, evocative of so many emotions, and incredibly powerful. They tell the story wonderfully. The combination of the illustrations and text makes the emotions jump off the page. I felt as if I was right there trapped on the ship with the slaves ~ tired, scared, hot, hungry.

Not too many graphic novels discuss slavery, especially a part of history that's as forgotten as Tromelin. I certainly hadn't heard of it before reading this. The story is told by alternating from present day scientists, journalists, archeologists, etc. excavating the site, and the historical events as they were occurring.

While the history was wonderfully done, the parts about the present day excavations were only okay. Their findings of long lost artifacts did help to complete the story. Also definitely a trigger warning for slavery, assault, abandonment, etc.

Overall, I highly recommend reading The Forgotten Slaves of Tromelin. Powerful, emotive, impactful, an important part of history that's told through gorgeous illustrations in this graphic novel.

The history of the shipwreck who left slaves on the Island of Tromelin for 15 years is both good and sad, there is still hope, maybe, in this world.

La storia del naufragio che lasciò gli schiavi abbandonati sull'isola di Tromelin per 15 anni é sia bella che triste e lascia anche un minimo di speranza, forse.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

This tale of the shipwreck of the the French ship L'Utile in 1761 was fascinated. The cargo of slaves and surviving crew built a raft in which the crew left the island of Tromelin and reached Madagascar. Meanwhile the surviving slaves carried on and after 15 years the remaining 7 women and one child were rescued. The graphics and the story were brilliant.
Interspersed with this story was one of an exploration of the island to find evidence of the slaves and how they survived. This second part was not as interesting, partially due to the amount of details it contained.

I have to admit to liking this book much more than I thought I would. Yet another evocation of the slave trade, I thought – but this is much more surprising and unusual to be discounted in such a way. Here the slaves were stuffed into a boat that was shipwrecked on a slip of an island – and their supposed history is presented here – all fifteen years of it. Interspersed with the ligne clair comic version of their lot is a painterly, postcard-styled reportage of the much more recent archaeology that recovered their habitation and gave some long-lost clues to how they managed to survive. I disliked this to some extent for its visual style – with narrow gutters, and captions both above and below the images it's impossible to read some pages in the right order. But on a whole the two distinct narratives are distinctive, and worth exploring.