Pumpkin Heads

Pumpkinheads is a sweet story about two friends spending their last Halloween in a pumpkin patch. This really must be the world’s best pumpkin patch, based on all of the different food stands and attractions that were shown or mentioned. It was the Disneyland of pumpkin patches.

Pumpkinheads was my first graphic novel. I bought the Kindle version of this book by Rainbow Rowell two years ago, but had not read past the first couple of pages. So this review is a response to reading a graphic novel in general just as much as it is a review of Pumpkinheads as a story. Possibly more. This is different for me. I’m very auditory, and to me, books are about words.

Reading Pumpkinheads, a graphic novel, was a little confusing at first. I had to read the word bubbles in the right order. I had to really look at the pictures to see what was going on in the story. These might seem like silly or obvious things to point out, but these were the little differences that were, for some reason, hurdles to the very idea of my reading a graphic novel.

I got used to the different format pretty quickly, and soon stopped noticing that I was looking at pictures at the same time that I was reading words. To me it felt a little bit like watching a movie with subtitles. Since all of the text is dialogue, I could also compare it to reading a play. But with pictures. It was also pretty fast to read. Much faster than a traditional novel, because of course there is far fewer text on each page.

Fun fact; I started reading this while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my husband. At the end of the book, in the acknowledgments, the authors talk about bonding over their love of Star Trek: The Next Generation. True story.