Review: Nimona

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read the first chapter of Nimona shortly after the author posted it, but I have a short attention span and finally read through the whole thing today. It's amazing. It's a super fun fantasy/sci-fi/superhero hybrid, and while it pokes fun at a lot of the tropes in those genres, it still feels very much in the traditional spirit of each of them, somehow. It's like Stevenson took a typical hero-fights-dragon story, mashed it up with an anti-heto-fights-the-establishment story and some X-Men, and then injected it with a mutating virus named Nimona. There are bad guys, there are good guys, and then there's Nimona, a shapeshifting girl who wants to be a villain's sidekick (although the story clearly is interested in ambiguous morality, so few characters are one thing or the other). The supernatural elements are done very well, the art and layout (though a little rocky at first) grow to be a beautiful part of the story, and I would gladly read a dozen more books in the same world.

I also want to add that I love how Stephenson worked diversity into the world. The lead character is a young girl and the Director is a (bald?) woman, the villain and the hero are gay (together!), Ballister is physically disabled, there's a black female scientist, and the background characters are a realistic mix of races. And a lot of these traits are either logical consequences of the story or affect the characters' lives, but the race/disability/orientation is never a character trait in itself.

I could gush about Nimona forever, so I guess I'll stop here and say I want more - maybe a back story for the Director?

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