Frederik Peeters

In a vague time and place, little Addidas suffers fainting spells and works with her father as a chimney sweep, donning a helmet and crawling into the spaces too small for an adult to reach. Drawn as an adorable little waifish raggamuffin, I was instantly drawn into her giant eyes and found myself with sympathetic feelings and a strong protective urge toward her.

In another storyline track, a monster labors away in a weird and hellish underground boiler room. These sequences are ugly and show more wordless and held absolutely no interest for me.

Eventually, the two storylines cross and manage to cancel each other out entirely, leaving me in an emotional limbo. I like Addidas, but I don't care what happens next to the monster.

I'd almost keep reading the story for the art, but I fear the writing would probably start to annoy me. show less

Sometimes you read books you never thought you would read and that is the case with Blue Pills. Based solely on the cover, I would never have gravitated to this title, but I am glad I found it and that I have read it. The reading challenge, Booked2022 challenged you to read a book where the protagonist is HIV positive or has aids. What I love about this book is it shows a romance between someone who is HIV positive and someone who is not, and how they change each other’s world. This is show more subtitled a positive love story and it is exactly that. It never looks at the downsides. It addresses them, but it’s not the main thing. It’s about the relationship, in finding the good things among the scary things. This book quietly screams of hope and joy and was not what I was expecting at all. Even though it is 22 years old it’s still entirely relevant and a fantastic read whether you need to fill a reading challenge or just want to stretch your standard reading pile. show less

Not my favorite graphic style, and the translation is clumsy, but it is such a unique and well-written story! It is unlike any other graphic novel-- or novel-- that I have read in content and in style.

My favorite chapter is the one where the protagonist rides a well-read wooly mammoth discussing some of his emotional coping mechanisms for dealing with his girlfriend and girlfriend's son being HIV . Who knew Wooly Mammoth's had such good perspective and sense of humor??

A good, and pretty creepy, idea for a story! A group of people end up on a beach and start aging - rapidly! Children grow quickly into teens, and then adults. Older people get much older, and then...

Puberty, menopause, Alzheimer's, and death - all within the course of one day! What the??? And they have no idea why?! Add to that a story-within-a-story about a king and a half-man, and this may just have been the creepiest graphic novel I've ever read!

"It's impossible to tell you my age: it show more changes all the time!" - Alphonse Allais show less