Cloud Town

by Daniel McCloskey

Overview

An exciting middle-grade graphic novel about best friends, giant robots, and monsters from another universe!

In Dan McCloskey’s debut graphic novel, best friends Pen and Olive live in Cloud Town, an impoverished community on Floating Island, a mysterious landmass that drifts above the earth and happens to sit dangerously close to the Rip—a tear in the fabric of the universe. No big deal or anything.

While Pen is brash and brave, Olive is quiet, kind, and also fearful of bullies at school. That is, at least until the day they are nearly squashed by a Care Corp Storm Catcher, a giant android built to protect Cloud Town and the rest of Floating Island from Hurricanes, monsters that travel across the Rip. It isn’t the event itself that changes the girls’ relationship. It isn’t the fear of death that drives them apart, or the questionable decision-making that leads Pen to drag Olive into the cab of the crashed robot. It’s the fact that Olive can move the 90-foot-tall machine and Pen can’t. Care Corp recruits Olive to train as a pilot, so that she can protect Floating Island when the next attack comes. It’s a role reversal, for which neither of the girls are prepared.

McCloskey’s original art style shines in this wild adventure—it sets the tone for a story that is not only filled with fantastic monsters and mad science, but also the journey of two friends growing up and growing apart in a border town on the edge of the possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419753114
Publisher:	Amulet Books
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.87(d)
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

Dan McCloskey is a writer and graphic artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a recipient of the Creative Development Grant from The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. He also received the Small Arts Initiative Grant to promote reading as performance via the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers’ Project, which he founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. McCloskey’s a consummate zine maker and cartoonist. Cloud Town is his debut graphic novel.


Dan McCloskey is a writer and graphic artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a recipient of the Creative Development Grant from The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. He also received the Small Arts Initiative Grant to promote reading as performance via the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers’ Project, which he founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. McCloskey’s a consummate zine maker and cartoonist. Cloud Town is his debut graphic novel.

Editorial Reviews

06/03/2022

Gr 9 Up—Cartoonist McCloskey's debut YA graphic novel is a girl-centered sci-fi story about friendship, self-acceptance, and hard-earned bravery, set in a world threatened by giant monsters called Hurricanes. When a Hurricane destroys Cloud Town High School, the students must temporarily attend Tinker Town High School. Unfortunately, the much richer and more privileged Tinker Town students are often openly hostile to the Cloud Town teens, and among their frequent targets are audacious skateboarder Penelope (nicknamed Pen) and timid wallflower Olive. Pen has just defended Olive from another incident when they witness a Stormcatcher, one of the giant mechanical suits controlled by psychically linked pilots that were created to mitigate the Hurricanes' destruction, collapse on a building in front of them. Pen and Olive illegally enter the suit to see if they can help the pilot and save the folks trapped underneath. To their surprise, they are able to pilot the suit and get it back to its laboratory home, Care Corp. Care Corp., going against all existing protocols, decides to bring the girls on board as pilots. Pen and Olive must explore what it means to take on adult responsibility, how to be brave and merciful when one feels the opposite, and to what lengths they will go to ensure their community's safety. McCloskey's detailed art does a great job of emphasizing the emotional highs and lows of high school and mech combat. The gritty, textured look makes the characters and settings feel real and helps create a seamless transition between reality and the more fantastical elements of this adventure. VERDICT The emotional story of two friends overcoming personal obstacles against the backdrop of a rollicking giant monster adventure will be a hit with fans of Hannah Templer's Cosmoknights and Tillie Walden's On a Sunbeam. —Jennie Law

School Library Journal

2022-03-02
In Cloud Town, the interdimensional rip looses monstrous Hurricanes; the relational rip might tear a cherished friendship irreparably apart.

Newly uprooted to a nearby wealthy school, Pen and Olive rely on each other to survive. Anxious, academic Olive keeps Pen’s schoolwork on the straight and narrow. In return, hard-edged skater Pen protects Olive from the bullies who torment her. Troubles in their own lives, however, seem primed to push the girls apart. The rift between them only widens when an unexpected encounter with an escaped Hurricane under surveillance by the Care Corp reveals that Olive piloted the Storm Catcher that felled the creature. Not strong, capable Pen, but Olive, who’s afraid of everything. McCloskey’s debut graphic novel is a story of compatibility and divergence as two friends explore and adapt beyond the confines of their relationship and their own self-imposed limitations. Pen, with her troubled home life, is given the more developed backstory of the two whereas Olive has more character growth, gradually overcoming her insecurities and gaining both confidence and independence. Spending as much of the story at odds as they do, it is difficult to believe that the girls, whose personalities are not particularly complementary, were ever truly close; however, that does not detract from readers’ investment in their physical and emotional journeys. A limited color palette and viscerally detailed, dynamic art style vividly illustrate the rich quasi-dystopian world. Pen has Afro-textured hair, while Olive reads as White.

Weirdly and unexpectedly wonderful. (Graphic science fiction. 12-18)

Kirkus Reviews

"McCloskey’s debut graphic novel is a story of compatibility and divergence as two friends explore and adapt beyond the confines of their relationship and their own self-imposed limitations. . .Weirdly and unexpectedly wonderful." —Kirkus Reviews

"McCloskey’s detailed art does a great job of emphasizing the emotional highs and lows of high school and mech combat. The gritty, textured look makes the characters and settings feel real and helps create a seamless transition between reality and the more fantastical elements of this adventure." —School Library Journal

From the Publisher