Thank you to Netgalley, Diamond Book Distributors, and Magnetic Press for an ARC of Giacomo Bevilacqua's The Sound of the World By Heart.

I have a love for graphic novels formed both from my first job ever being a comic store manager and from my absolute adoration with anything containing a Narrative Arc (thank you, English Degree thing one and thing two), but I was absolutely drawn in by the idea of a story being told, in a graphic novel, about a character who would not be speaking throughout the whole of the novel itself.

I loved that it was about pictures, memory, and feelings, how these intersected, defined, and defide language all at once. I do feel a little like the end of the story cheats the challenge, and the author lets the character off a little too easy with "giving him the right to cheat and end it earlier on, because it was just a personal challenge" (even though we're told in grand detail how much it is for the city and the magazine, especially with how much money is being paid to him and each day of the two months.

I feel like the "communication" that takes part and makes itself a conversation changes all of the end and the challenge for me, leaving it a little off kilter. But not quite enough to take away all poignant feelings I have about this world and how it moved into my heart, my chest and my head for the time while I was reading it.