180 pages
Publisher: Seven Seas
Genre: humor, fantasy, YA
AN UNFAMILIAR JOURNEY
When the devil girl Patty finds she's too weak to summon an animal familiar, she chooses a human instead. His name: Norman Volcanello--an eccentric guy with a dangerous fascination with exotic life forms. As Patty and Norman set out to find her missing father, an offbeat adventure begins!
I grabbed Sorry for My Familiar without really looking at the premise – I guess I expected it to be about witches and their animals or something. However, the premise just made it way WAY better for me.
Patty the devil girl is too weak to summon an animal familiar, so she chooses a human demonologist named Norman instead. Set loose in devil world to find her missing father, things go about as well as you’d expect.
The Good: I feel like in a lot of ways this was hand-written for me. It starts really fast with little setup, and you’re thrown into the adventure pretty straight away. It’s just so ridiculous – Patty’s looked down on for using Norman, but his skills help the pair out a lot, too…as much as they get them into trouble. Between getting suckered into a familiar deathmatch, getting lost in a desert, and having to store Norman in a barn with a giant lethal creature that he just wants to sketch and learn about, plus hearing how much trouble her dad’s gotten into along the way, this thing is chock full of fun and silliness. Both Patty and Norman have their extreme emotional reactions to things and play the straight person for each other at other times. It’s not a perfect balance yet, but I could see it really coming together in future volumes. The illustrations are over the top where it counts, adding to the emotion. I love the sheer amount of character types in this world, which helps out a fairly straightforward narrative. Adding in the character of her uncle helps a lot, too. In some ways, I wish a little more time was spent in some of these places, because there’s a lot to see framing the main story. We never really leave Patty and Norman’s point of view, which is a solid choice, but it also feels a little limiting given the sheer amount of stuff in this world.
The Good: I feel like in a lot of ways this was hand-written for me. It starts really fast with little setup, and you’re thrown into the adventure pretty straight away. It’s just so ridiculous – Patty’s looked down on for using Norman, but his skills help the pair out a lot, too…as much as they get them into trouble. Between getting suckered into a familiar deathmatch, getting lost in a desert, and having to store Norman in a barn with a giant lethal creature that he just wants to sketch and learn about, plus hearing how much trouble her dad’s gotten into along the way, this thing is chock full of fun and silliness. Both Patty and Norman have their extreme emotional reactions to things and play the straight person for each other at other times. It’s not a perfect balance yet, but I could see it really coming together in future volumes. The illustrations are over the top where it counts, adding to the emotion. I love the sheer amount of character types in this world, which helps out a fairly straightforward narrative. Adding in the character of her uncle helps a lot, too. In some ways, I wish a little more time was spent in some of these places, because there’s a lot to see framing the main story. We never really leave Patty and Norman’s point of view, which is a solid choice, but it also feels a little limiting given the sheer amount of stuff in this world.
The bad: Not really bad, but it definitely reads like a first volume. I’m not sure what could have been changed to suck me in a little more, but there were times I felt myself disengaging, or thinking ‘oh my gosh, what now??’ It leaves off after a punchline on an adventure, so there’s no real cliffhanger or something that makes me feel like I need to know what comes next, even though it’s set up as a long-form adventure. This feels like a better fit for middle grade and younger teens, but it’s still a fun flip through overall.