Blog Tour ~ Nell of Gumbling: My Extremely Normal Fairy Tale Life by Emma Steinkellner ~ 5 Reasons to Read the Book
Afternoon all!
A sparkly magic welcome to the Blog Tour for Nell of Gumbling: My Extremely Normal Fairy Tale Life by Emma Steinkelliner! This was just such a fun looking book and I had to be part of the tour! And BOY OH BOY, I am happy! This book was just oodles of fun and it was so magical~
For today’s post I got 5 reasons why you NEED to read this book along with book/author information.
Let’s get started!
5 reasons I would recommend to read this book!
1. The art Since this is a graphic novel I just have to start with the art! I really enjoyed it a lot and I loved how the characters were drawn and how they really came to life. I loved all the details, the sparkles, and more!
2. The diary format along with text with comics Everyone who knows me knows that I love books that are diary formatted. It just makes things a bit more personal and fun for me. But this book isn’t just a diary it is a a mix of media. We get parts with just text and illustrations but we also get comics bits to tell the story. And I adored that. It made for a fun and varied read. Plus, it made it even more personal as the illustrations were drawn by the MC to make her diary even better. Hope that makes sense, haha.
3. Scavenger Hunt I just LOVE a good scavenger hunt and the girls you see on the cover along with others are going on a scavenger hunt to find something very important to the town and I was just rooting for them. The scavenger hunt was oodles of fun and I loved how it brought us throughout all the various parts of the town and surrounding areas. Some were quite easy to figure out and others were tougher. I loved how everyone worked together!
4.The various jobs/intern stuff While Nell wasn’t too happy about her chosen internship and I could understand it, I still love the idea that kids get an internship for a job. From working with a painter to collecting stars (yes, really, that was so awesome and I love what stars can be used for). I love that kids do get somewhat of a say in it, but in the end the teachers choose what you can do. And even though Nell didn’t get her first choice and it was a hobbly ride as she didn’t click with the woman of her job, in the end I think she was happy she had this chance. Because she learned new things and she found that this job isn’t so boring or that the woman is that bad. In fact I have to say that while at first I didn’t see why she was chosen to do this one after a few more chapters I could see it and I was hoping that Nell would see it as well!
5 Four smaller reasons, sorry, I just cannot keep to 5 reasons
5a: A fantastic cast: The various characters and seeing how some go from being kinda frenemies to friends. Plus, I loved Nell’s family and her dads.
5b: A town filled with magic and star-collecting and magical beings? Yes please! I would love love to visit Magical Land of Gumbling! Stay for a while. Maybe forever?
5c: The antagonists were well-written and brought in an extra dose of excitement and adventure.
5d: The lore of the town! There were so many stories about the town and I loved that later we got some more of them!
Raina Telgemeir meets the Land of Stories in this charming graphic novel-diary hybrid about a twelve-year-old girl and her perfectly average magical life.
To everyone else, the Magical Land of Gumbling is something out of fairy tales. But to Nell Starkeeper, it’s just home. Sure, the town community center might be a castle, her dads run a star farm, and her best friend Myra is a fairy, but Nell is much more interested in finding out if she’ll get the seventh grade apprenticeship of her dreams with world-famous artist Wiz Bravo.
She’s pretty sure her entire life has been RUINED when she’s instead matched with boring old Mrs. Birdneck in the town archives. And of course her perfect rival Leabelle gets to work with Wiz, and mean girl Viola won’t let Nell forget it. Meanwhile, suddenly Myra seems more into hanging out with Leabelle and saving the town from some weird strangers who keep talking about turning Gumbling into a fancy resort than being friends with Nell anymore. Can Nell find a way to save everything that makes her world magical, while figuring out where she belongs in it?
Buy here:Amazon
Emma Steinkellner is an illustrator, cartoonist, and writer based in Los Angeles, CA.
She is the author and illustrator of the middle grade graphic novel The Okay Witch (Aladdin, Fall 2019). The Okay Witch tells the story of 13-year-old Moth Hush, who learns that magic is to be expected when you’re a Hush in an adventure that spans centuries, generations, and even worlds as Moth unravels the complicated legacy of witches at the heart of her town, her family, and herself.
She is a graduate of Stanford University’s department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where she created, wrote, and illustrated her thesis It Gets Weird, a science fiction sex ed graphic novel for adolescent readers and where she proclaimed herself “one of Stanford’s most elite goons”.
Working in print and webcomics, Emma has illustrated projects with her radiant sister, writer Kit Steinkellner, including the teen rom-com webcomic Aces and the Eisner-nominated superhero coming-of-age story Quince with Fanbase Press and is the creator of the comic diary Pow Slam Sparkle.
