Cassandra Darke

by Posy Simmonds

Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million.She has become a social pariah, but doesn’t much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence – her own crime involving ‘no violence, no weapon, no dead body’.But in Cassandra’s basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body... Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction, Bande Dessinée, Crime, Graphic Novels Comics, Thriller

136 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2018

About the author

Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of both children's books and graphic novels. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she has drawn the series Gemma Bovery (2000) and Tamara Drewe (2005–06), both later published as books. Her style gently satirises the English middle classes and in particular those of a literary bent. Both of the published books feature a "doomed heroine", much in the style of the 18th- and 19th-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 1 out of 5]

I haven’t done one of these in a while but I felt like I needed to because nobody’s calling this crap out on the book’s listing and I’m not going to waste my time reading the rest of this garbage to give it a “proper” review!

So this is a review of a Did Not Finish book: Posy Simmonds’ latest, Cassandra Darke. And, like many of you who find themselves suffering through some bad reading, I checked out the reviews to see if there was someone out there who understood my pain, but I didn’t see anything that came close to mirroring my experience of this drek. So I thought, let me be the catharsis for anyone foolhardy like me who attempted this rubbish - you are not alone!

How far did I make it? Page 34 out of 94. Now, I’ve stuck out comics as bad as this for longer but I especially found this soul-sucking as it really is a Graphic Novel. That is, blocks of dreary prose alongside plain pictures with only the occasional panel looking like a recognisable comic. I can’t stand this style - it needs to go away and die a slow, painful death many decades ago.

At nearly the halfway mark there’s no discernible story to be had. The title character is a grumpy old cow art dealer who got stung for most of her fortune after she ripped off some patrons. Her ex’s pretentious, entitled twentysomething daughter is hanging about in her downstairs flat. Yes, that is all! Just a horrible cast of cunts for company and I couldn’t do it. Not that I need the characters in a story to be likeable, but, in lieu of a story, they have to be entertaining and they really aren’t in Cassandra Darke.

This is the kind of comic that tossers who only read Ian McEwan novels and The Guardian pick up to make them feel cosmopolitan - “ooo, how broad-minded of me, a bourgie intellectual, slumming it by reading a Graphic Novel, honk honk fart!” The current state of British comics is Darke indeed.

[Hanneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so happy to read another delightful graphic novel of Posy Simmonds! This one is also a modern version of a very popular Victorian novel, in this case ‘A Christmas Carol’ of Dickens. Wonderful graphics and witty conversations and thoughts in abundance, just like in her previous graphic novels ‘Tamara Drewe’ (based on Far from the Maddening Crowd) and Gemma Bovery (of course, based on Madame Bovary). Both graphic novels are terrific! They are truly in a class of their own. ‘Cassandra Darke’ has another doomed female as a main character. Cassandra sold fake modern masters in her former posh art gallery and has just been convicted in court for doing so. She is far from likeable, a very grumpy and mean older woman but will, just like Scrooge, arise as a true heroine and benefactor in the end.

Dear Ms Simmonds, a personal request from your adoring reader: would you please consider Jane Eyre for your next graphic novel? She would make a great destitute female, even in a modern setting, don’t you agree?

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book has an interesting layout. It is a graphic novel but has large sections of text which, I think, adds more depth to the story.
Posy Simmonds has a range of these graphic novels and this is the first one I have read.
This one is about a grumpy old lady, Cassandra Darke, who had previously been done for fraud in the art world. She begrudgingly helps out a young girl, Nikki, by letting her stay in her basement flat in return for her helping her with her paperwork. But when Nikki falls in with a dodgy crowd, Cassandra finds herself unwittingly involved in another crime.
It’s a lovely hardback book, with thick quality paper that made it enjoyable to read. I loved the excellent artwork, especially the Christmas scenes in and around London. I have marked it down slightly as I though the story was slow at times. 3 1/2 ⭐️

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a graphic novel. The first one I read by her was Gemma Bovery (modern day spinoff of Madame Bovary) and then I read Tamara Drewe (modern day spin-off on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd). Posy Simmonds is really good, in my estimation (and based on the reviews below, also from more able reviewers than I). Her stories are interesting. With this novel, at times it was a bit hard to follow the different frames of the cartoons (do I go from left to right on the page or do I go down and then right and then down again…. but for the most part it was OK.

A brief synopsis of the storyline, shamelessly stolen from the back of the book:
• Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth 7 million pounds. She has become a social pariah, but doesn’t much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offense – her own crime involving ‘no violence, no weapon, no dead body’.
• But in Cassandra’s basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body…Something which forces Cassandra out of her rick enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life. 😮

I bought my copy of the book from Abebooks.com, and 50% of the pages (the first half of the book) were drenched in a perfume. Apparently whoever owned the book must have dropped a whole bottle of pinkish perfume or cologne on the front pages and then somehow someway the liquid seeped into more pages. I was getting overcome by the fumes while reading! 😮

I wonder if I should figure that into my overall rating? Overall odor of the book…. 🤨

Reviews:
This review will show you what the actual pages look like of this book so you can get a sense for the layout of the graphic novel and her exquisite skills as a graphic artist:
• https://theaoi.com/2019/08/27/cassand...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• http://theslingsandarrows.com/cassand...
• https://mrspeabodyinvestigates.wordpr...

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cassandra Darke is set over a couple of Christmases and tells the story of the title character, a millionaire art dealer who's found to have been defrauding clients and leaves her profession in disgrace. Subsequently, she agrees to take in her stepsister's daughter, Nicky, as a lodger-cum-assistant. Nicky provokes the ire of a dodgy guy in a club (but not before giving him Cassandra's name and phone number), then gets involved in a problematic relationship; the lives of the two women become awkwardly, and dangerously, entangled.

Some reviews describe Cassandra Darke as a reworking of A Christmas Carol, but that's only really true in that Cassandra is a Scrooge-like figure, rich yet miserly, who is to some extent 'redeemed' – and presumably her initials are a nod to Dickens. Aside from that, there are few parallels, unless the misdirected dick pic is meant to be a stand-in for one of the ghosts. As ever, Simmonds is brilliant at illustrating nuances of human interaction and emotion via the small details of body language, facial expressions and exclamations. This is a read-it-in-one sitting book, yet it's far from simplistic. I loved Cassandra (I found her much more sympathetic than I think I was supposed to!) and it was delightful to lose myself in the snow-dusted London of Simmonds' imagination for a while.

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[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Simmonds would be a great place for graphic novel newbies to start: she writes proper, full-length stories, often loosely based on a classic plot (Gemma Bovery on Madame Bovary, Tamara Drewe on Far from the Madding Crowd, this one on A Christmas Carol), with lots of narration and dialogue alongside the pictures. Set between December 2016 and December 2017, Cassandra Darke is the story of a 71-year-old art dealer who’s laid low by fraud allegations and then blindsided by a case of mistaken identity that brings her into contact with a couple of criminal rings. She’d let her stepsister’s daughter, Nicki, a penurious performance artist, live in her basement in exchange for being her personal assistant, but Nicki fell in with a dodgy boyfriend and then everything got complicated.

To start with, Cassandra is a Scrooge-like curmudgeon who doesn’t understand the big fuss about Christmas – “If everything’s such a nightmare, why do it? Why waste your money? Why martyr yourself?” – but she gradually grows more compassionate, especially after her own brief brush with poverty. Luckily, Simmonds doesn’t overdo the Christmas Carol comparisons. (I looked around for a Christmas past/present/future structure but couldn’t find one.) Much of the book is in appropriately somber colors, with occasional brightness: Cassandra’s blue scarf, Nicki’s dyed pink hair, or the many pops of yellow (including the endpapers and built-in bookmark).

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my favorite Posy Simmonds novel (that would be Gemma Bovery) but I will always give a Simmonds work five stars because I want to go back and read them again and again. I buy them the moment I hear about them, and NEVER lend them out to anyone. This hardback edition (very reasonably priced, I thought) is a collector's item with thick gloss paper and a ribbon marker.

The story is mostly in the first-person POV of Cassandra, with an occasional shift into third person when we get the background from her niece Nicky. That jars a tiny bit when you first encounter it, but the glory of graphic novels is that the author can play with many different ways to present the material and I was soon immersed in Nicky's world with its pressures to perform and its social awareness warring with nights of drunken hedonism. I absolutely recognized that world from the Facebook feeds of the 20somethings I've known since they were children.

The London Simmonds portrays is almost Dickensian with its stark contrasts between extreme wealth and grim poverty, and I liked the way the young lovers are able to move between those worlds while Cassandra and her generation are almost entirely cocooned in middle-class luxury. It's a presentation that displays a certain sympathy with the values of the Baby Boomer generation while making it very clear where they (we) went wrong.

Cassandra is the ultimate unsympathetic main character that you can't help liking. Or at least I did--I admired her for being a career woman from a generation where women were expected to like the idea of marriage and children. I loved her honesty about her utter indifference to marriage and children, which contrasted nicely with her blindness about the venality of the world in which she has made her money. She's a rich and nuanced character, selfish but oddly attractive, and I felt that I literally recognized her--but enough said about that. Great characters are always an amalgam of several observations.

I kind of wished the plot hadn't involved a fall from grace on Cassandra's part. I've have liked to have seen her brought low from a position of strength, but I imagine she'd never have given house room to Nicky if there hadn't been a practical reason for it.

There was something very poignant about the photos of Cassandra's younger days. I felt that Cassandra and her world were what Simmonds understood, while the world of the younger characters is a feat of observation from the outside. I rather hope Simmonds has at least one more book in her and that it will deal with growing old in this day and age, the bizarre nightmare of a dementia-ridden last stage amid the gathered luxury of the world's most (financially) fortunate generation. I truly hope this clever, clear-sighted work of art isn't the last we see of Posy Simmonds, our Jane Austen of graphic novels.

[Juan Naranjo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cassandra es una adinerada anciana londinense muy malhumorada y tacaña. Se mete en un importante lío legal al vender unas falsificaciones y se introduce, de la mano de su sobrina, en el sórdido mundo del crimen y los barrios bajos de una ciudad que, hasta ahora, para ella solo había sido lujo y privilegios.

Este cómic, con un contenido a medio camino entre lo social y el thriller, trata temas de gran interés que no son muy habituales en las novelas gráficas: la soledad de la vejez, la trata de blancas, la especulación económica en el arte, los rencores familiares, el mundo de las galerías de arte... y lo poco que sabemos los ciudadanos medios de cosas tan extrañas en nuestras vidas (y tan comunes en nuestras películas) como el crimen, las armas o las condiciones de los inmigrantes ilegales.

La mezquina Cassandra me ha parecido un personaje maravilloso. Ojalá hubiera más libros protagonizados por personas mayores en los que se tratase algo más que la vejez, la enfermedad o la muerte. A Cassandra le pasan cosas increíbles y de eso trata el libro. Y las cosas increíbles no solo le pasan a la gente de menos de 70.

Creo que los saltos temporales podrían estar mucho mejor explicados, pero los dibujos son de los más elaborados y bonitos que he visto en cómics recientes. Se nota que Posy Simmonds tiene una experiencia brutal en lo relativo a la ilustración. Hay páginas en las que te pasas minutos y minutos viendo los detalles. En este sentido me ha gustado mucho que sea un cómic que, en horas de lectura, “cunde mucho”.

También quiero resaltar que me ha gustado mucho la diversidad de medios que usa para contar la historia: desde mensajes telefónicos a artículos de periódicos, carteles y cartas. Eso hace la historia muy dinámica y contemporánea.

Estoy deseando leer los otros cómics publicados por la autora.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down (4 stars for the artwork, 3 for the story)

A modern take on A Christmas Carol, where the antihero is Cassandra, a curmudgeonly ageing art dealer who takes a young, struggling artist (Nicki) into her expensive London home providing she works as Cassandra's assistant. Nicki gets involved with a guy with a troubled past, and we follow the story as the threads link up to a murder.

Let down by an anti-climax of an ending, this is an otherwise enjoyable read, which I think would make for a good introduction if you had never read a graphic novel before.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will admit with the number of books I read that declaring my surprise over a specific book can seem a little too cliché at times - however I have to say that I honestly didn't know what I was letting myself in for when I picked up this book to read is an understatement. True I have seen numerous people praise this book from those I follow and respect to complete strangers. I also know of the pedigree of the work of Posy Simmonds and the acclaim she has collected for her work over the years.

And yet I had no idea what to expect.

I can say that this is the first time I have read a book like this - part novel, part graphic novel this has a charm and a quality to it I have not read before and I have to say I am impressed. The characters are down to learn - love them or hate them you can at least relate to them and for me I think that makes this story all the more biting.

There are some interesting messages within these page but I think the most striking is that of the titular character Cassandra Drake. This is a book I will be reading again as I suspect there are aspects I missed and that to me is the sign of a great book.

[Electra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Les textes sont nombreux et pourtant il ne fait que 96 pages ? Le plaisir de retrouver Posy Simmonds et son regard sur la société et cette Cassandra, quel caractère !

[Monica San Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta novela gráfica es una novela negra en toda regla, con su punto de acidez e ironia, ademas tiene uno de esos personajes principales realmente inusuales que aunque deberian caerte mal a priori es fantástico, me encantan las ilustraciones y como estan combinadas con el texto, sin duda una autora a seguir

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heerlijke onversneden Simmonds: oer-Britse whodunit, with a touch of Posy-magic.

[Gorgowood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Las novelas gráficas de Posy Simmons siempre me sorprenden: por su variedad de temas a tratar, por sus personajes y por el uso de diferentes canales de comunicación entre ellos.

En este caso, de nuevo vemos como es casi un cómic novelado, con gran cantidad de texto.

Su protagonista es una señora antipática y borde pero con un carisma especial que la hace algo entrañable, y que se aleja de las convenciones asociadas a personajes de esas edades por su. complejidad.

Explora también entresijos del mundo del arte, la soledad, la pérdida,la codependencia. Muy recomendable.

[Brown Girl Reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting mystery graphic novel but the main character just got won my nerves. It's well drawn and the story is well developed. The layout of the graphic novel is very different from what is usually expected but that was very interesting to look at. I give this a 3,5 stars. I'd probably read more albums later, but it won't be a priority.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting presentation. Partly text, partly graphic novel style, a great flow to the story, and without a doubt, excellent art.

[Cami L. González · Rating 3 out of 5]

Estuvo bien, la verdad es que no tenía la más mínima idea de qué me iba a encontrar, pues no leí ni la sinopsis.

Cassandra Darke es una marchante de arte, que hizo algo ilegal. Perdió su fortuna y su nombre está en el suelo, para empeorar todo encuentra algo que no debería en su propia casa. Así es como pasamos al pasado, un año atrás, y nos enteramos de la historia de Nicki, su sobrina que vivió con ella un tiempo. Las vidas de ambas se mezclan con asesinatos, violaciones y crímenes.

Es interesante el cómo cuenta la historia, hay varios saltos temporales y, además, de perspectivas. Vemos tanto la historia en el presente a través de Cassandra y del pasado con Nicki y Cassandra. El retrato de esta, su forma de ver la vida y de llegar a ciertos arrepentimientos me gustó. Al final, Cassandra estaba enojada con la vida y con ella por no haber intentado vivirla de verdad.

Sobre el crimen es uno de esos casos que se enredan y enredan por confusiones y mentiras, me gustó el cómo estaba armado el desenredo de todo y la importancia del caso. La autora toca temas importantes, además de un retrato de la vida en la ciudad y ciertos contrastes. Admito que no me esperaba todo este caso tipo película o capítulo de CSI, pero estuvo divertido.

Me gustaron las ilustraciones, pero no tanto la estructura completa de la novela gráfica. Había mucho texto y en bloques grandes con letra pequeña, lo leí en digital y no fue tan cómodo como podría haberlo sido. Imagino que en papel debe ser mejor.

Es una buena novela gráfica, más cruda y con la intención de retratar no solo personas reales, sino que realidades. Nadie es bueno aquí, ni nuestras protagonistas ni siquiera los personajes que muestran como "buenos", solo son personas.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unlikable, unchanging characters and awkward storytelling drown out what might have been an interesting little crime tale in Cassandra Darke. A grumpy, grouchy, downright mean art dealer gets busted for fraud, finds a gun in her spare bathroom, and begins to spin a tale of how it might have arrived there. Her divorced husband's daughter also half-narrates parts, she being the resident of the spare bedroom.

The tangled narrative feels forced - backwards and forwards and back again leaves the head spinning. Cassandra Darke reads like a low-rent take on a Guy Ritchie crime movie. Numerous characters, many moving parts, an unreliable, unlikable narrator. But it never really comes together.

[Karine Mon coin lecture · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5
On aime bien détester Cassandra.

[Marko8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fantastic graphic novel kept me such good company while I am experiencing a cold.

I love the plot, I find it very creative, with a very pleasantly sophisticated vocabulary.

Out of all the adult graphic novels I have read that are not historic, I would deem this in my top 5 possibly. I also really loved the art style and coloring. This was pretty perfect in my eyes. I really really enjoyed the intellectual of Cassandra Darke's thoughts.

I would undeniably recommend this book.

[David Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a Christmas present (thank you!)

In Cassandra Darke, Simmonds uses the graphic novel format to create something resembling a scrapbook, juggling both panels and chunks of narrative (which sometimes contain, or flow round, single drawings or panes addressing points in the text, or linking with pictures elsewhere in the book). It's told from different perspectives, with the main protagonists (Darke and her niece Nicki) unaware till the end of some parts of each others' story. This reinforces their different points of view, oddly building sympathy for these very different women (who don't actually like each other very much).

Darke is a London gallery owner, something of a monster - snobbish, offensive, aggressive to everyone and, as soon emerges, not above breaking the law. She's also magnificent - unapologetic about how she lives her (fairly unconventional) life, she refuses to be defined by others' expectations of, and assumptions about, her.

What she isn't, though, also matters a lot - Cassandra doesn't really 'do' people and has no patience, especially, with the young. So her stepdaughter Nicki coming to stay always seemed likely to end badly.

And it does.

As the story opens - with Darke's, er, dark secret, discovered - that period is coming to an inevitable end so we get Cassanda's conclusions about it first, but Simmonds then hops back to show what had been going on, including things Cassandra doesn't yet know, before returning to the consequences in the present. In between, she cooks up a complex, fast moving tale encompassing, among other things homelessness, male violence towards women, criminal gangs and the 'empty quarter' of London where luxury flats lie empty in the ownership of foreign oligarchs. Through it all, Simmonds' evocative pictures transport one to all these different Londons - whether to Cassandra's sleek, modern-styled house, to pubs and bars where chancers rub shoulders with upright citizens and outright villains or to the even grubbier areas (where Cassandra really meets trouble).

It is a powerful book, clearly inspired partly by A Christmas Carol (the misanthropic central character forced to accept that they are, indeed, part of humanity, the sense of redemption, some echoes and parallels in the way the story evolves) but much more than that, engaging with the realities of (especially) modern London and picking its way through social norms and conventions (watch how Billy's accent changes). The detail of the illustrations gives plenty of scope to read and reread, always with more to be found (another parallel with Dickens!)

I'd thoroughly recommend this book.

(CWs for some violence towards women and a scene with a dog).

[Alex Sarll]

"Britain's favourite graphic novelist", according to the back cover. Now, sales figures are a bugger of a thing to find if you're not in the business, and any other index of 'favourite' even more so, but is Posy Simmonds really bigger and/or better-loved than Watchmen? Raymond Briggs? Attack on Titan? Or do they just mean 'graphic novelist' as in one appreciated by the sort of person who thinks 'graphic novel' is a genre or even a medium, as opposed to a format? Which is to say, she's the favourite of middlebrow mugs? I rather suspect they might. Yes, the art is brilliant, just like Simmonds' art always is – the faces, the acting, the London streets and the country roads, the fancy launches and the grotty meals, the poor bloody pug. But equally, the story is another will-this-do slice of upper-middle-class misbehaviour, tipped from genteel snubs into something far more dangerous and melodramatic as soon as one is fool enough to interact with the lower orders. Oh, and as ever, it's meant to be loosely based on a nice recognisable classic, so as to give the story the illusion of depth and substance, though in this case the echoes of Dickens are faint indeed, which is probably for the best given how often Scrooge has been riffed on over the years; at least Bovary and Hardy were somewhat fresher. The dialogue would all be fine in gag cartoon strips, but at book length the need to explain everything palls. Even when there's a potentially promising direction for the script, it will falter: so, as lonely old Cassandra considers acceptable deaths, specifically hypothermia, she muses that "I really wouldn't mind being another hump in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich". Which is almost wonderful, until you realise how awkwardly the exposition of that "painting by" sits in what's supposed to be the monologue of an art dealer. The moral is suitably Christmassy, which I'd forgotten was the dominant setting, so reading it during the ongoing inferno may not have been the best idea – but then, the snowy London December in which its set is not one I've seen any time recently, for all its gestures at contemporary realism. If a decent writer can ever convince Simmonds to collaborate, she has the potential to work on a great graphic novel. In the meantime, this still ain't one.

[Mariam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curiosamente compré esta novela gráfica sin saber nada de ella y me terminó gustando.

Es una historia muy cruda y realista con personajes grises, lo cual la hace más interesante porque refleja más su humanidad.
Honestamente, quiero leer más de esta autora.

[CarolineFromConcord · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this murder mystery set in London so much that I'd like to give it a 5. But I mean, *War and Peace* is a 5, and I can't exactly equate them.

I am grateful to Wendy Greenberg, https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1..., for the recommendation. On the surface, the handsome graphic novel is about a pink glove and a gun, but on a deeper level the novel features an older woman coming to terms with the way she has spent her life.

Cassandra Darke is a wealthy, cantankerous, sometimes dishonest art expert who reminds me of Melissa McCarthy's character in the biopic "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" Against her better judgment, Cassandra allows her counterculture stepniece Nicki to live in her basement, making her do endless errands for the privilege.

Nicki goes to a friend's "hen party" (bachelorette party) in a shady bar at which she is required to pick up a guy. The guy she picks turns out to be more than unsavory and Nicki unthinkingly involves her aunt in his threatening world. Inevitably, the two antagonistic women have to join forces to uncover a crime, one that also lets author-artist Posy Simmonds address an important social justice issue in England.

I thought the comic-style illustrations were fantastic. The facial expressions and body language alone were amazing. Can't recommend this highly enough.

Wendy Greenberg seems to read a book a minute. You might like to follow her. I also loved her recommendation *This Boy,* which was a British politician's childhood autobiography. So sad.

[Owen Townend · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had all the components of an endearing thriller but it lacked sufficient balance between them.

The book starts off with promise, revealing the titular character who is a tough old bird and a white collar crook. It isn't immediately apparent but you can work out that Cassandra will get the chance to redeem herself before the last page.

Then, however, we are introduced to her niece Nicki's perspective, which is delivered suddenly in the third person and with much less colour. While this is needed to develop plot, I found that the head-hopping took me out of proceedings, especially because Nicki's perspective isn't distinguished by a different font.

The groundwork takes some time to lay out but eventually things start to really happen though only fifteen pages from the end. I'm not sure your average comic or graphic novel reader would have the patience to stick around so long, particularly with Cassandra's frustrating snobbery.

Nevertheless I was very glad to have had my bloody-mindedness ultimately rewarded. The previous work of Simmonds that I have read is more funny and quaint while Cassandra Darke adds a certain grittiness to her repertoire.

While I can't say I'll read this again, Cassandra Darke is enjoyable and ultimately life-affirming. I recommend it to fans of Simmonds and those looking to add a graphic dimension to their love of cosy crime.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I dislike memorial services. In my experience people go to them for the drinks afterwards. And beforehand they sit there planning their own send offs and checking how old/ill/fat their contemporaries look. Not that my motive (curiosity) is any better.”

This was one of those many books that I picked up on a whim and I’m glad I did. In spite of the cover telling me that the author is “Britain’s favourite graphic novelist” I had never heard of her before?...but if I believed everything I read on a book cover…

I wasn’t a fan of the art work initially, but it as I got into the story, I found myself really warming to it. This was a really well worked story, the curmudgeon, septuagenarian protagonist is refreshingly awful and controversial, but incredibly convincing too. There are some really nice touches in here, the mix of blocks of texts with the art work, works effectively.

There was a waft of Hannah Berry and Joff Winterheart about this book. There is a cold, bleak quality to the colouring that really plays well with the nature of the story. Regret, paranoia and existential angst hang in the air, as the intrigue and suspense build and tighten over a nicely paced plot line that really make this book quite a treat.

[Sassenach · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'aime énormément les albums de cette auteure anglaise qui sont vraiment des exemples parfaits de ce qu'on appelle "roman graphique". Le texte est aussi présent que le dessin, toujours aussi fin et doux, avec des couleurs pastel. Et puis, le récit parle toujours de personnages particuliers, de problèmes de société, de psychologie ... là encore, avec cette Cassandra qui pourrait apparaitre comme rébarbative, c'est à nouveau une réussite car j'ai été happée par l'histoire, qui lorgne un peu vers le polar !

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit fluffy to be honest, but maybe Posy Simmonds has always been and I've just changed in the last five-ish years since I discovered her work.

I still love her drawing style & nuances, and 'Cassandra Darke' even has a bittersweet feel-good ending I appreciated at times like these (writing this during Corona winter I'll take all the feel-good moments I can get, thanks very much).

But would you please not make the two most important male characters look identical next time? I couldn't tell those two white boys apart AT ALL.

[Joanna Flis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think that graphic novels are my favourite but I love this story! Horrible old lady (Scrooge in skirt?), naughty niece, crime and London. Joy!

[Andrew McClarnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a deep read, firstly there's the artwork, loving in its character and detail, funny in its observation, but dramatic in its story telling. Then there is the story itself....