Book picks similar to
Lola: A Ghost Story by J. Torres


graphic-novels
graphic-novel
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young-adult

The Girl Who Owned a City: The Graphic Novel


O.T. Nelson - 2012
    My parents are gone, so I'm responsible for my little brother Todd. I have to make sure we stay alive. Many kids are sick or starving, and fierce gangs are stealing and destroying everything they find. Lots of people have given up, but here on Grand Avenue, some of us are surviving, because of me.I figured out how to give the kids on Grand Avenue food, homes, and protection against the gangs. But Tom Logan and his army are determined to take away what we've built and rule the streets themselves. How long can we keep fighting them off? We need to find another place for us to live safely.A strong place, a secret place.In a world like this, someone has to take charge.

Hotel Dare


Terry Blas - 2019
    ADVENTURE AWAITS.  Olive and her adopted siblings Charlotte and Darwin are spending the summer with their estranged grandma at her creepy hotel and it’s all work and no play. They’re stuck inside doing boring chores but they soon stumble upon an incredible secret... Behind each room door of the hotel lies a portal to a different strange and mysterious place. The simple turn of a knob transports them to a distant magical world filled with space pirates. Behind the next door are bearded wizards. Down the hall is a doorway to a cotton-candied kingdom. But once the doors are opened, worlds start colliding, and only one family can save them before they tear themselves apart.  Written by Terry Blas (The Amazing World of Gumball) and illustrated by the talented Claudia Aguirre (Kim & Kim), this world-hopping fantasy tale breaks down the door to imagination and dares you to embrace the idea that family is everything.

Green Lantern: Legacy


Minh Lê - 2020
    But not even his most imaginative drawings could compare to the colorful adventure he's about to embark on.When Tai inherits his grandmother's jade ring, he soon finds out it's more than it appears. Suddenly he's being inducted into a group of space cops known as the Green Lanterns, his neighborhood is being overrun by some racist bullies, and every time he puts pen to paper, he's forced to confront that he might not be creative enough or strong enough to uphold his ba's legacy.Now Tai must decide what kind of hero he wants to be: will he learn to soar above his insecurities or will the past keep him grounded?

Ichiro


Ryan Inzana - 2012
    When he wakes up, he isn't in Japan anymore. In fact, he isn't in the mortal world. Ichi has entered the domain of the gods.With words and pictures, Ryan Inzana seamlessly interweaves myth and reality, life and death, gods and mortals, creating a wholly original fantasy adventure about one boy's search for peace, acceptance, and a place to call home.

Coraline


P. Craig Russell - 2002
    At first, things seem marvelous. The food is better than at home, and the toy box is filled with fluttering wind-up angels and dinosaur skulls that crawl and rattle their teeth.But there's another mother there and another father, and they want her to stay and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go. Coraline will have to fight with all her wit and all the tools she can find if she is to save herself and return to her ordinary life.This beloved tale has now become a visual feast. Acclaimed artist P. Craig Russell brings Neil Gaiman's enchanting nationally bestselling children's book Coraline to new life in this gorgeously illustrated graphic novel adaptation

The Road to Epoli


Ben Costa - 2017
    . . a walking, talking, singing skeleton minstrel. He's the one skeleton in the dungeon who seems to have retained his soul, and he has no idea why. His only clue to his former identity is a song he hears snippets of in his dreams, an epic bard's tale about the Road to Epoli and the land of Eem.His sidekick and sole friend is the gelatinous Goo, who Rickety alone can understand. Together they set out in search of Rickety's past, with abundant humor and danger galore.

Brain Camp


Susan Kim - 2010
    And yet, here they both are at Camp Fielding, settling in with all the other losers and misfits who've been shipped off by their parents in a last-ditch effort to produce a child worth bragging about. But strange disappearances, spooky lights in the woods, and a chilling alteration that turns the dimmest, rowdiest campers into docile zombie Einsteins have Jenna and Lucas feeling more than a little suspicious...and a lot afraid.

Gotham Academy, Volume 1: Welcome to Gotham Academy


Becky Cloonan - 2015
    Only the best and brightest students may enter its halls, study in its classrooms, explore its secret passages, summon its terrifying spirits…Okay, so Gotham Academy isn’t like other schools. But Olive Silverlock isn’t like other students. After a mysterious incident over summer break, she’s back at school with a bad case of amnesia, an even worse attitude… and an unexplained fear of bats.Olive’s supposed to show new student Maps Mizoguchi the ropes. Problem: Maps is kid sister of Kyle, Olive’s ex. Then there’s the ghost haunting the campus…the secret society conducting bizarre rituals…and Bruce Wayne, the weirdo billionaire who funds the Academy - and may know the secret to Olive’s big mystery.Find out in GOTHAM ACADEMY VOL. 1, the acclaimed new series from co-writers Becky Cloonan (DEMO) and Brendan Fletcher (BATGIRL) and artist Karl Kerschl (TEEN TITANS: YEAR ONE)!Collects: Gotham Academy #1-6

Beetle & the Hollowbones


Aliza Layne - 2020
    Then there’s twelve-year-old goblin-witch Beetle, who’s caught in between. She’d rather skip being homeschooled completely and spend time with her best friend, Blob Glost. But the mall is getting boring, and B.G. is cursed to haunt it, tethered there by some unseen force. And now Beetle’s old best friend, Kat, is back in town for a sorcery apprenticeship with her Aunt Hollowbone. Kat is everything Beetle wants to be: beautiful, cool, great at magic, and kind of famous online. Beetle’s quickly being left in the dust. But Kat’s mentor has set her own vile scheme in motion. If Blob Ghost doesn’t escape the mall soon, their afterlife might be coming to a very sticky end. Now, Beetle has less than a week to rescue her best ghost, encourage Kat to stand up for herself, and confront the magic she’s been avoiding for far too long. And hopefully ride a broom without crashing.

Primer


Jennifer Muro - 2020
    Her father is a known criminal who once used Ashley to help him elude justice, and in his attempt to escape, a life was taken. He now sits in federal prison, but still casts a shadow over Ashley's life. In the meantime, Ashley has bounced from foster home to foster home and represents a real challenge to the social workers who try to help her--not because she's inherently bad, but because trouble always seems to find her.Ashley's latest set of presumably short-term foster parents are Kitch and Yuka Nolan. Like Ashley, Kitch happens to be an artist. Yuka, on the other hand, is a geneticist working for a very high-level tech company, one that's contracted out to work for the government and the military. And it's Yuka's latest top secret project that has her very concerned. Developed for the military, it's a set of body paints that, when applied to the wearer, grant them a wide range of special powers. Fearful that this invention will be misused, Yuka sneaks the set of paints home, substituting a dummy suitcase with an ordinary set of paints in their place.From here, signals get crossed. Ashley comes home from school one day with her new friend Luke and, thinking that the Nolans have purchased a surprise gift for her upcoming birthday, finds the set of paints. Being an artist, Ashley naturally assumes these are for her. It isn't long before she realizes that she's stumbled upon something much bigger and a lot more dangerous. Although she uses her newly discovered powers for good, it's not long before the military becomes wise to what happened to their secret weapon. And this spells big trouble not only for Ashley, but for her newfound family and friends as well.

Displacement


Kiku Hughes - 2020
    Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.

Jane, the Fox & Me


Fanny Britt - 2012
    Her school life is full of whispers and lies — Hélène weighs 216; she smells like BO. Her loving mother is too tired to be any help. Fortunately, Hélène has one consolation, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Hélène identifies strongly with Jane’s tribulations, and when she is lost in the pages of this wonderful book, she is able to ignore her tormentors. But when Hélène is humiliated on a class trip in front of her entire grade, she needs more than a fictional character to allow her to see herself as a person deserving of laughter and friendship.Leaving the outcasts’ tent one night, Hélène encounters a fox, a beautiful creature with whom she shares a moment of connection. But when Suzanne Lipsky frightens the fox away, insisting that it must be rabid, Hélène’s despair becomes even more pronounced: now she believes that only a diseased and dangerous creature would ever voluntarily approach her. But then a new girl joins the outcasts’ circle, Géraldine, who does not even appear to notice that she is in danger of becoming an outcast herself. And before long Hélène realizes that the less time she spends worrying about what the other girls say is wrong with her, the more able she is to believe that there is nothing wrong at all.This emotionally honest and visually stunning graphic novel reveals the casual brutality of which children are capable, but also assures readers that redemption can be found through connecting with another, whether the other is a friend, a fictional character or even, amazingly, a fox.

Witchlight


Jessi Zabarsky - 2016
    The unlikely pair grow more entangled as they travel together, looking for the missing half of Lelek's soul – the source of her true magical abilities. Both women are seeking to learn, in their own ways, how to be whole again. This book collects the serialized story all into a single volume, including the heart-gripping conclusion and other all-new material.

The Dam Keeper


Robert Kondo - 2017
    A dangerous black fog looms outside the village, but its inhabitants are kept safe by an ingenious machine known as the dam. Pig’s father built the dam and taught him how to maintain it. And then this brilliant inventor did the unthinkable: he walked into the fog and was never seen again.Now Pig is the dam keeper. Except for his best friend, Fox, and the town bully, Hippo, few are aware of his tireless efforts. But a new threat is on the horizon—a tidal wave of black fog is descending on Sunrise Valley. Now Pig, Fox, and Hippo must face the greatest danger imaginable: the world on the other side of the dam.Based on the Oscar-nominated animated short film of the same name, The Dam Keeper is a lush, vibrantly drawn graphic novel by Tonko House cofounders Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi.

Shadow of the Batgirl


Sarah Kuhn - 2020
    But when Batgirl goes missing from Gotham, can Cassandra defy her destiny and take on a heroic mantle of her very own?Cassandra Cain is the daughter of super-villains and a living weapon trained from birth to be the ultimate assassin. But that doesn't mean she has to stay that way, right? She'll have to go through an identity crisis of epic proportions to find out. But how do you figure out who you're supposed to be when you've been trained to become a villain your entire life?After a soul-shattering moment that sends Cass reeling, she'll attempt to answer this question the only way she knows how: learning everything she possibly can about her favorite hero--Batgirl. But Batgirl hasn't been seen in Gotham for years, and when Cass's father threatens the world she has grown to love, she'll have to step out of the shadows and overcome her greatest obstacle--that voice inside her head telling her she can never be a hero.Sarah Kuhn, author of Heroine Complex and I Love You So Mochi, takes on her favorite hero of color for a new audience of readers. Featuring the edgy art style of Nicole Goux, Shadow of the Batgirl tells the harrowing story of a girl who overcomes the odds to find her unique identity.