The Shadower

by Peter Hoey, Maria Hoey

Readers will lose themselves in this surreal spy thriller… and may find it impossible to find themselves again.

Nadia is a quiet drama student in a country divided by a brutal civil war. Amid the steady tension of armed men, checkpoints, and random violence, the theater is her one escape. One evening, after an Ibsen performance, she is given an opportunity to serve her people. Nadia bears a strong resemblance to a waitress in the next district whose café is frequented by enemy agents. Would she be willing to take her place for a week and plant recording devices? It’s a dangerous mission that will take all her acting skills to disappear into this role… but she knows that she has no choice. As Nadia settles into the other woman’s apartment and life, she becomes more immersed in this character than she ever imagined. And as one week drags into two, she realizes this isn’t going to end the way she hoped…

In The Shadower, award-winning sibling duo Peter and Maria Hoey present a haunting, ice-cold story of identity, espionage, and betrayal.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels Comics, Graphic Novels

Kindle Edition

Published March 24, 2026

Reviews

[Opal Edgar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such an odd little graphic novel.
It's taken me a couple of weeks to decide what rating to give it because I'm myself not very sure how I feel about it.

I can't say this is "enjoyable" because that's not the point, but it definitely is lingering, giving me that same feeling as when I read "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth" - though obviously not in the same depth since it's quite a short work.
It's definitely in that bag of experimental, more intellectual comics that talk about human nature.

It's very cold, lonely, with flat emotions. Not much happens really, but there is a very heavy and uncomfortable tension throughout, because you're just waiting for the drop.
It's very effective that way. The loneliness and ambiant sadness is palpable in this very focused spy thriller.

So while I can't really say I liked it, I'm really glad to have read it and I do think about it. I'm impressed by how much it managed to distill into the story with so little, confirming that sometimes the power in something comes from the silent moments rather than the big noisy ones.

I would recommend to people who don't need a lot of action. Also to those who've read Bertold Brecht and it left a mark. And of course people into the indie comics scene and look for something different.

[Casey Halvorsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley, IDW Publishing, and Top Shelf Productions for this arc

3.5 /5 rounded up

This was an interesting concept. I enjoyed the story, but also felt disengaged from it for at least the first half because of how the narration was spoken at the reader. I understand now the reasoning behind it, but it took me a bit to get into it. Same with the art style, everything is very same same throughout the whole thing which bugged me at first but again, understood the reasoning near the end. The story was interesting but a little confusing with the way it ended. I promise I liked it, I know I'm kind ragging on it but I think it's more me being tired and not picking up on everything 😅 I think a second or even third read through would help to bring further depth and meaning to this story. It feels like it has many layers, despite being so short and concise! This was a very intriguing and entertaining noir thriller, and I'll definitely be looking to read more from the Hoeys in the future.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Shadower” and the Most Frightening Kind of Disguise: Not Invisibility, but Forgettability
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026

In “The Shadower,” Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey build a spy thriller the way a theater company builds a set: with carpentered angles, deliberate sightlines, and props that mean more than they should. The first thing you notice is how ordinary the apparatus is. A café. A streetcar. A folded newspaper. A trash bin. A samovar that arrives like ritual. The second thing you notice is how quickly the ordinary turns disciplinary. The café is not a setting but a system. The streetcar is not transportation but a funnel. The folded newspaper is not information but a container. And the samovar – a domestic object meant to keep something warm – becomes the book’s coldest altar.

This is, on its face, a story about Nadia, a young drama student in an unnamed capital that has stumbled out of a decade-long civil war without landing in anything resembling peace. The city is chopped into sectors controlled by different factions; movement is regulated by checkpoints and passes; violence is intermittent but omnipresent, like weather. Nadia has lived inside this arrangement for most of her life, the way a person can grow up near a highway and stop hearing the traffic. Her family history is fused to the country’s. Her father, a playwright and theater director embedded in the cultural machinery of the ruling faction in her sector, was killed in a truck bombing outside the National Theater. Her mother, an actress, survived badly burned and afterward receded into a muted life of classical music and sitting still. Nadia’s world is thus bracketed by two forms of performance: theater as refuge and theater as wound.

When Nadia is recruited by a security operative from her sector’s ruling faction – a man named Nikola – the book’s central idea reveals itself with grim neatness: performance is not merely metaphor here. It is the state’s preferred technology. Nikola offers Nadia an “impersonation job” that will supposedly last seven days. She will become a waitress named Miriam in a rival sector’s café and, each day, attach a small voice-activated listening device to the underside of a samovar served to O’Brien, the head of the rival faction’s counterintelligence. When he leaves, she retrieves the device and drops it in a trash bin near the tram stop, tucked inside a folded newspaper. The intelligence apparatus is engineered like stage business. There is the prop (the device), the cue (a glance from the manager), the blocking (the path from bar to table to kitchen), the exit (the drop at the bin), the reset (tomorrow’s identical routine).

The Hoeys’ craftsmanship is in the way they refuse to romanticize spy work. This isn’t the gadgetry glamour of “Mission: Impossible.” It’s closer to the procedural chill of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” where institutional life is made of repetition, and repetition becomes fate. Nadia trains for her role in a warehouse where Nikola’s team has built a full replica of the café, staffed with agents playing customers and employees. She memorizes the staff’s names, the café’s regulars, the location of cups and saucers, the choreography of espresso and tea. She practices Miriam’s handwriting. She is given an audio sample of Miriam’s voice and repeats its nasal cadence until it fits her mouth. She is fitted with a dark wig, heavy-framed glasses, contact lenses, contouring makeup, and a mole placed precisely where Miriam has one. She looks in the mirror and sees, with a kind of bleak praise, the kind of woman no one would look at twice. The disguise is not meant to make her alluring; it is meant to make her forgettable.

That emphasis – on becoming unremarkable as a survival skill – is one of the book’s most contemporary and most unsettling insights. Nadia’s job is not to be invisible. It is to be ignored. In a surveillance world, invisibility is suspicious. Forgettability is safer. You can hear the resonance with our own era’s anxieties about being watched, scored, categorized, and turned into data points. The book does not need to gesture at any particular headline to feel current. It’s enough that Nadia lives in a city where phone lines are monitored, borders shift, and a piece of paper can decide whether you’re allowed to exist somewhere.

The café sequence, when it begins, is a master class in how to write tension without relying on chase scenes. On Nadia’s first day, she rides the tram with Leon, the busboy she recognizes from surveillance photos; he sits beside her, chats about football, and does not register anything strange about her voice. This is both relief and terror: the disguise works, which means Nadia must keep wearing it. At the café, regulars filter in; men argue about the local team; cups clink; the espresso machine hisses. There is one empty table, conspicuously unoccupied, no one daring to take it. When O’Brien arrives, bodyguards sweep the table and chairs with a device. Tomas, the manager, delivers newspapers. Nadia receives her cue and brings the samovar. She attaches the bug: a metallic click. O’Brien’s cigarette smolders in an ashtray. He does not answer her greeting. In these scenes the Hoeys show how power doesn’t always announce itself through speeches. Sometimes it’s just an absence of response, a refusal to reciprocate even basic human acknowledgment.

Around this ritual, the book’s moral weather thickens. Nadia notices how the kitchen men fall silent when she enters. A customer taunts her: trying to earn spare change as a snitch. The café’s social fabric is a net of suspicion where gossip and accusation do the work of policing. Another day a woman arrives – an unaccompanied woman, rare enough to be remarked upon – pleading, weeping, insisting that something has happened and cannot be ignored. O’Brien gestures for her to sit, answers her briefly with bored annoyance, then has his men hustle her out into a waiting cab and pay the driver like they’re disposing of an inconvenience. The scene reads as both political and intimate: grief is treated as a security problem.

Outside, in the neighborhood, the state’s logic becomes literal signage. Nadia passes a crowd surrounding a body left on the sidewalk, head covered with a cloth sack, a cardboard sign hung around the neck labeling the dead person a traitor. No one removes the corpse; permission must be granted. Later, the corpse is gone; flowers lie nearby; an old man hoses the sidewalk as if washing away history. The brutality has been processed into routine.

If the novel were only a political thriller, it would already be a strong one – a bleak cousin to “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” or “The Sympathizer,” with its sense that all factions have dirty hands and that service is rarely voluntary. But “The Shadower” has another register it keeps tuning toward: the surreal pressure of identity becoming porous.

That porousness arrives first as fatigue and dissociation. Nadia is drained by the constant vigilance required to keep the ruse intact. She experiences dizzy episodes. At one point she comes to in a phone booth with a dead dial tone, unsure how she got there or whether she called someone. These moments are written with a cool restraint that makes them more unnerving. The book doesn’t dramatize them with fireworks. It presents them as symptoms, as if the body and mind are quietly protesting the conditions they’ve been placed in.

Then comes the clue that cracks the impersonation plot open into something stranger: photographs of Miriam taken at the National Theater. Nadia recognizes the staircase. She risks contacting her mother, who studies the photos and names the girl: Magdalena, a student from the academy, one year older than Nadia, who died in the theater bombing. Her body was never recovered. Her mother’s commentary contains one of the story’s most chilling pieces of realism: during the war, people took identities from the dead to cross borders and secure passports. In other words, Miriam may already be a borrowed name. The role Nadia is playing might itself be an earlier performance – an identity built from absence. That the National Theater is the connective tissue is cruelly apt. Nadia’s father was killed by an attack on performance, and now Nadia is being consumed by performance as a political method.

The Hoeys are sharp about how intimacy intersects with these systems. On her way back from her mother’s, Nadia runs into Luc – her friend, the academy’s star – who kisses her. The kiss lands like a flare in the darkness, a reminder of a life that might have been. It is also, later, the measure of Nadia’s loss. When she attempts to contact Luc again near the end – messaging him anonymously from an internet café because phone calls are too risky – she waves at him as his tram passes. He looks directly at her and does not recognize her. Recognition is the most basic social proof of selfhood. Without it, identity becomes a private claim no one is required to honor.

This is where “The Shadower” begins to resemble “The City & the City” more than le Carré: the enforced logic of seeing and not seeing, and the way a community can be trained into selective perception. Nadia is still present. She is simply no longer legible as herself.

The book’s most audacious move is to literalize the metaphor of becoming your role. Nadia’s mole, once makeup, becomes real. Her hair darkens and thickens overnight. Her face subtly changes: jaw, chin, cheekbones. Her eyes darken; lashes thicken. The mirror begins to show her out of register, as if the image cannot lock onto a stable identity. Her memories drift. Thoughts and memories that are not hers rise to the front. The acting manifesto’s line – “Leave no trace of yourself; only the role will remain” – returns not as an artistic credo but as a curse.

Readers may argue about how to interpret these changes. Are they supernatural? Psychosomatic? The result of drugs? A political allegory made flesh? The Hoeys are clever in the way they keep the mechanism just out of reach. The uncertainty is part of the dread. The important point is that the book refuses the comforting notion that selfhood is inviolate. In this world, the self is a surface that can be written over by power, by repetition, by fear, by necessity.

Administration is the book’s true horror. Nadia receives onion-skin notes slipped under her door evaluating her performance. Later, the note reads: “Performance Extended,” and two more devices appear. Onion-skin paper is a perfect symbol: it is used for tracing, copying, layering. The notes imply an unseen director revising the script. The mission’s promised seven days is meaningless.

Meanwhile, the city itself is being rewritten. Checkpoints change. Borders shift. The Green Line moves and an entire sector is now under PRC control. A war front becomes an editing decision. The book’s political imagination is bracing: your neighborhood can become someone else’s jurisdiction while you’re still wiping crumbs off a counter.

The plot’s most violent pivot arrives when Nikola, Nadia’s handler, is dragged into the café as a prisoner. O’Brien interrogates him. Nadia watches in shock. A declaration is made that Nadia is the mole. Nikola is untied and forced to examine her disguise. He yanks her hair. He rubs at the mole, insisting it is fake. And then, in a moment that collapses the book’s surreal and procedural halves into one, the truth is revealed in front of witnesses: the hair and mole are real. Nadia has been made into the role. O’Brien delivers the book’s most chilling theatrical line: “This is your curtain call.” Whatever happens afterward, the phrase functions as a thesis: in this world, performance is judgment.

From there, the ending clarifies the deeper conspiracy driving Nadia’s situation. Nadia realizes Nikola orchestrated the theater bombing that killed her father. It is a realization that arrives with delayed fury and with an implication of institutional rot: barbaric acts can be approved and funded at the highest levels. The book suggests that Miriam has known this truth all along and has waited patiently for Nikola to be delivered. Revenge, then, is not merely personal. It is bureaucratically facilitated.

In the final pages, Nadia attempts to reach across the border of her former life and finds it closed. Her travel pass is stamped “EXPIRED.” She cannot leave the sector. She cannot see her mother. She cannot risk O’Brien learning anything about her old identity. The loop tightens until the only thing she can cling to is the role of Miriam. “In order to survive, she must disappear.”

The mirror scene that follows reads like the consummation of the Hoeys’ method-acting nightmare. Nadia studies Miriam’s averted gaze in a photograph and looks up at her own reflection, now altered. Her head spins. Her memories wash away like a tide pulling sand from underfoot. Someone else’s thoughts come forward. She rubs her cheeks, feels the bones in her face, recognizes the face in the mirror as hers but not exactly. When she smiles at her reflection near the end, it is not a triumphant smile. It is a merger. The book’s final gesture – the cyanide tablet and the implication of a fatal act delivered through the samovar – is less about mechanics than about the moral shape of assimilation. The self that might have hesitated is being crowded out by the self that has waited.

What makes “The Shadower” linger is its refusal to separate the personal from the political. Its most effective scenes are not speeches about ideology but the small coercions that accumulate until they alter the body: a manager’s correction, a neighbor’s casual familiarity, a guard’s stamp, a note slid under a door. The novel’s brilliance is in how it shows coercion working best when it wears the mask of normal life. Violence is not always spectacular. Often it is repetitive. It is the daily demand to be convincing.

As comps, the book sits in a compelling constellation. There is the actor-as-asset premise of “The Little Drummer Girl,” the bureaucratic cynicism of “The Trial,” the paranoia of “A Scanner Darkly,” and the moral grime of “The Quiet American.” Yet the Hoeys’ particular DNA is the way they braid those influences into something that feels at once spare and barbed, a thriller told with the economy of stage directions and the lingering dread of a ghost story. The ghost, in this case, is not a supernatural figure but the afterimage of a person who can be erased, duplicated, and redeployed.

Still, the novel is not perfect. Its commitment to atmosphere and mechanism sometimes keeps its secondary characters at the level of function. One can imagine a version that lingers longer in the human mess of these people’s contradictions. The Hoeys appear to have chosen a different goal: to render individuals as shapes inside an apparatus, which is, admittedly, one of the book’s points. If that choice occasionally narrows emotional range, it also gives the novel its hard, clean edge.

That edge is why the book earns its high score without reaching the untouchable realm of perfection. My rating: 88/100. “The Shadower” is an accomplished, unsettling piece of political noir that makes the metaphor of performance feel newly dangerous. It asks what happens when the role doesn’t merely require craft, but consumption – when the state wants not only your obedience, but your ability to vanish so completely that even love, even memory, cannot find you.

[Jannik Fogt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stille fortalt spy-drama med god pacing og en Lynch-light agtig stemning. Er ikke helt sikker på hvordan den skal tolkes; om den blot skal ses som et lille stykke magisk realisme, eller om der er en logisk forklaring på den mærkværdige identitetsforveksling som hovedpersonen gennemgår.

Settingen er abstrakt, det kunne være en splittet by, som Berlin efter anden verdenskrig eller det kunne være en by i et fremtidigt Amerika, det er ikke helt til at vide. Denne distanserede stedslighed fremmedgøre læseren en smule, og det er måske en pointe i sig selv.

Det infografisk-agtige artwork er på en og samme tid både lidt kedeligt, men samtidigt helt vildt dragende, mine øjne elsker det, og det er en meget behagelig læseoplevelse. Illustrationerne kan minde lidt om andet amerikansk undergrund; Charkes Burns, Daniel Clowes men uden at weirdfactoren kommer helt op at ringe.

Vil gerne læse mere fra det kreative søskendepar - Peter og Maria Hoey.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

My Selling Pitch:
A bland, espionage, revenge thriller graphic novel.

On my do not read list.

Pre-reading:
This cover is ominous.

(obviously potential spoilers from here on)
Thick of it:
In such a crudely drawn graphic, there’s literally zero reason to draw a girl naked with a panel focused on just her ass.

The side characters look so similar that I can't tell if they're trying to imply that they're also undercover or if it’s just the art style.

So like she was leading a double life this whole time? Or is she actually transforming?

Post-reading:
I wasn’t a fan of this one. I think I was expecting some trippy, dystopian horror especially after they name-dropped Orwell, but instead it was just a lackluster revenge thriller. You’re never given an explicit explanation for why her appearance changes. Is it magical realism, were the family leading double lives the whole time, who knows! And that sounds compelling, but the story’s tone is so dry and monotonous, you never get invested in the characters. The art style reminded me of an uglier Archer. There’s no humor or banter. There’s a couple of completely unnecessary male gaze elements to this. They were jarring and annoying to see. I can’t recommend this one.

Who should read this:
Orwell fans
Generic thriller fans

Ideal reading time:
Anytime

Do I want to reread this:
No

Would I buy this:
No

Similar books:
* The Red Mother by Danny Luckert-graphic novel, revenge thriller, paranormal, cults
* George Orwell’s Animal Farm by Christina Dumalasova-graphic novel, classic retelling, dystopian
* No Man’s Land by Szymon Kudranski-crime thriller, graphic novel

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and IDW Publishing for an advance copy of this graphic novel about a young woman forced to play a role in a battle between two forces, and finds herself wondering who she used to be and what she seems to be becoming.

I am not a person comfortable talking to others. I pay attention more than share, give back what they tell me, and keep my own feelings and ideas to myself. People seem to like that. This is a role I put on almost all the time, well outside of my own family. We all take on roles. Work personas, to get us through the day. Actors do this to make there roles understandable to themselves, allowing them to portray a character for our enjoyment. A spy does this to acquire information. Becoming someone different, maybe more outgoing, maybe more retiring. Brave and saucy, of meek and mild. The spy in the house of love, a cardinal in the Kremlin. Or a waitress in a cafe, as in this story. The Shadower by Peter Hoey and Maria Hoey is a graphic novel about identity, danger, the way people perceive us, life during wartime, and what happens when a role is forced on us, one that seems so comfortable, that we lose ourselves in what might be, rather than what we are.

Nadia is a young woman with a gift for acting, something that was passed on to her by her father, a playwright and acting coach. Nadia's father wrote the book about acting, about losing oneself in the role, and forgetting the past. Nadia has grown up in a city at war, with two opposing sides fighting for control, a fight that has cost Nadia her father in a theater bombing. Nadia is approached one day by members of the secret police. Nadia looks quite a bit like a young woman who lives on the other side of town, a waitress in a cafe with a very prominent client. A minister in the government who uses the cafe as his office.. Nadia is tasked with becoming Miriam the waitress, and recording the conversations that this minister, O'Brian has with his many, many visitors. This is to last only a week, and Nadia will be free. Nadia takes to the task, becoming Nadia, learning the ways of the cafe, and recording O'Brian's conversations. However things start to go wrong. Nadia needs less makeup to look like Miriam. The terms are extended in her role. And Nadia is beginning to wonder who she once was, and what the future might hold.

I have long enjoyed the works by the Hoeys. There stories seem simple, but really work on a lot of levels, with the art telling the story in a way that might be different than the words being said. There is a bit going on here, far more than the simple spy story is seems. A bit of Mission Impossible, a touch of Kafka and maybe a soupçon of Philip K. Dick. The story is not only a spy story, but a story about identity. Miriam seems to have an interesting life before Nadia takes it over. Neighbors stop to stare, mention is made of a incident in a market. Nadia never seems to wonder why. Characters seem to look like each other, making one wonder if this is a dream, or maybe a way that Nadia has to deal with the death of her father. There are a lot of ways the story can be interpreted. The art is good, I like the Hoey's simple seeming art, that really tells and adds to the story.

An interesting story, probably not for everyone. Again, I have enjoyed their works and get how they create and mold their tales, so this was right up my alley. Fans of different kinds of stories, and also fans of interesting art will enjoy this story, and find many other works by these two to enjoy.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Theater with espresso.”

The Shadower by Maria and Peter Hooey (March 24, 2026) is terrific, a noir thriller with a possible surreal/supernatural backdrop, and flat, icy overtones, with echoes from a graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 I just (coincidentally? Are there any coincidences?! Jung sez no!) happened to also be reading. Thanks to the authors and Top Shelf and Net Galley for the early look. Since I am interested in the Hoeys' work I picked this to read from Net Galley, but at the time I had no idea it had some connection to 1984; for instance, there is a central character in The Shadower named O’Brien, also the name of one of the main characters in 1984. In fact we learn he has adopted his name, a pseudonym, after the 1984 character, who might be described as a “shadower” of Winston Smith. So this is a political thriller in the guise of surrealism, or maybe something like Fritz Lang's M, but also very much a Hoey work. The thing we assume for much of 1984 is that O'Brien is in the resistance with Winston. Until we know he is not. The O'Brien in The Shadower: who is he?

In the Shadower--a kind of eerie noir thriller--we meet a theater family who are also active in the resistance to a gangster-led government. Nadia, an actress, is asked by the resistance group to play the part of a waitress in a coffee shop for a week to help tape conversations of some shadowy guys. Nadia's father had already been killed in the resistance. She has no choice but to do the job for them. Nadia looks like waitress Miriam, who had been killed, and she has to prepare carefully for this dangerous role, too.

“Leave no trace of yourself. Only the role will remain”--her father’s acting advice

And then, Nadia sees she looks more and more like Miriam, even adopting some of her memories. Nadia had been affixing aa beauty mark on her cheek; one morning she awkes to find she has grown a beauty mark. She no longer has to wear a wig, as her hair is darkening like Miriam's. Performance, identity, espionage, lies. I was reminded of the Citizen Kane Hall of Mirrors scene, that infinite fracturing, or nesting Kachina dolls, one doll inside another. Who is she? Feels a bit Hitchcockian, too. Or Persona by Bergman, as identities meld. Or M by Fritz Lang. Or, yes, 1984.

Looking at Miriam, smiling, in a photo, Nadia recalls Miriam had died in a bombing, as did Nadia's father. So who is Miriam being played by!? And Miriam's body was never recovered!

Things are not what they seem, as we learn in mysteries!

Nadia’s dreams increasingl get dominated by Miriam, and dreams, too, of her mother and father. How did her father die, and why? Dizzy spells complicate her performance of Miriam, as do slips in the restaurant, mistakes that might betray her. Explosions happen all the time as the action ensues, as intense clandestine meetings occur in the coffee shop. A woman meets with the men and cries.

The artwork works better here than almost anything else I have read from the Hoeys, fitting the genre exploration, political thriller to echo our age. Identity, espionage, lies/acting, betrayal. Great work! I need to read it again to see more intertextual links and themes!

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

An up-and-coming actress, Nadia, is commanded by the people ruling her half of their capital city to go into the other half, ruled by others, and take the place of a lowly coffee bar waitress for a week, living as her – Miriam – round the clock in order to bug a bigwig at work. It's a high-risk performance – so much for her father writing about actors disappearing into roles, as if Nadia slips up she won't be seen again. But what would happen if she was too good in the part?

I quite enjoyed this drama, for the Mitteleuropean setting, the sheer conceit of the performance, and for some of the quirks here. Visually things really like to concentrate on the straight line – cars are exaggeratedly boxy, apartments are portrayed within an inch of their plan, perspective is definitely something given much attention, and so on. The biggest quirk here is the narrative voice being present tense, which normally brings immediacy but here comes out as more dry, an emotionless report as to Nadia's doings. It's fairly verbose, too, but I want to believe it is aiming for the "suspect is now walking up the stairs… suspect is now entering the flat…" reportage you can imagine the Stasi making.

What choices were made that I didn't like? Well, the font is not a great one. The story has a building spread of inevitability to it. The male characters, as other reviewers have said, look too similar. But what the heck is the baddy doing with a PRC identity, and a warehouse newly stickered with PRC, when he's supposed to be RPC, and Nadia and her family are the PRC side?

Other tiny beats are silly ideas – Nadia fixing her makeup for the transformation in the street, at night. Things can slip out of folded-up newspapers (and I am not sure she's ever seen buying one). Yes, there are enough small annoyances here to make me doubt the creators' grip on this material – but none like putting the baddy bigwig in the wrong faction. Which leaves me in a quandary – I could rate this as I felt when reading it, or as the reader who's read it and found all the holes in it. The only fair way is to be the latter – for all my performing chops it won't serve anyone if I act the part of the former. And therefore this is a generous three and a half stars, frustratingly missing what it could have got.

[Lucsbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting "The Shadower" to be a heavy read, considering the themes it touches on, such as living under an authoritarian regime and being forced to become a spy, but most of the tension came from how the book portrayed the danger as boring and normal.

The horror wasn't in the political assassinations, but in the bagged bodies that appeared on sidewalks for everyone in the neighbourhood to see and walk around, because no one was allowed to move them. It was in everyone's silence as people came into rooms, and how neighbours kept their eyes and ears open in constant vigilance. It was in how violence was seen through the corner of the eye, as characters went through their normal working days. The way tension was built throughout the story was awesome.

I thought this would only be a two-star read because, despite touching on some very important themes, I felt that the story was dragging without saying much, until I got to the very last few pages. I'm still not convinced that everything in this story works, but I think that has to do with some plots not being explained enough. I wish there was more to this story: maybe flashbacks or secondary characters having more time on page, because I think the book would have benefited from having a little bit more emotional weight rather than leaving us with so many questions.

I did love that plot twist, though.

Thank you to Edelweiss, NetGalley, Top Shelf Productions and IDW Publishing.

[Steff Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first time I've ever read a graphic novel with a "show don't tell" problem and I'm honestly a little unsure what to make of it. The story of The Shadower was interesting, definitely pretty unique overall, but 99% of it is written in summary of everything that's happening on the page which leaves absolutely no room for the reader to interpret from dialogue or the literal artwork what's happening in the story. Nope, we're literally just told every single piece of what's happening so much so that it basically makes all of the illustrations pointless.

Like, seriously. Why is this a graphic novel if you're going to summarize every single panel? Why is there so much opportunity for dialogue that's just missing because you couldn't trust your readers to understand what's going on in your story? I feel like they basically just slapped the "artist direction" over the illustrations and were like, yeah, that's good enough because they didn't even want to try putting together something that actually showed character.

Readers are smarter than what this graphic novel gives them credit for.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Lila Danisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating: 3,5 stars!

At first it was hard for me to read this graphic novel. The illustration style was nothing like I prefer. It was stiff and giving an old style. The writing style was not different. So distant and dense. I needed time to get used to the illustrations and the writing, but the story dragged me in. The storyline was actually so good. About spionage and stuff. The storyline was giving the tension through the middle to almost the end of the story. However, I was kinda disappointed with the ending. I expected clear and grand final in the story. What I got were confusion and open end type of ending. The ending left me with many questions.

Aside of the (me) problems I got from the ending, this graphic novel forced me to explore new illustration and writing styles. Personally it felt rewarding how I could read and eventually enjoyed this book.

Thank you to Maria Hoey, Peter Hoey, IDW Publishing, Top Shelf Productions, and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Shadower” is a unique graphic novel. It’s unique in story (an actress taking the place of someone to trick the enemy) and in art.

I loved the artwork and the page layouts. They were so unique, and they added to the graphic novel. The story is good and all parts of it just work. Quite an enjoyable read.

I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recieved a copy of this ARC thanks to NetGalley and IDW Publishing. I am leaving an honest and voluntary review.

The premise of this story was really interesting. However I found the story to feel very passive and distant from the reader, with much of the comic being told to us instead of allowing the reader to experience. Additionally I felt some things needed to be explained a little better, as it was a little rushed and vague.

[Haruka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read!! The storyline was interesting! Became a spy and eventually lost her own identity. I enjoy reading the book so much!
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Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for giving me a chance to read this book in advanced~

[Crimson Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you. Netgalley for an advanced copy of this manga for an honest review

This was an ok read but I really couldn't get into it much, yet I can see others enjoying thia story and wanting more ... unfortunately for me it couldn't keep my attention

[Frankkie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.25 stars - I received this book as an eARC.