Graphic Novel Review--Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout

I don't know much about history and I don't know much about science so I doubly don't know much about Marie Curie and her scientific discoveries. So it was with great excitement that I started reading Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss.

Redniss spends a little more than two hundred pages chronicling the life of Marie Curie, from her romance with Pierre to her scientific successes and failures to the tragedies that marked the later years of her life. The story is hardly original. After all, there are dozens of biographies of Marie Curie and none of them could be complete without mention of her relationship with Pierre, who was her partner both in science and in life. But this telling is fresh and unconventional.

Radioactive isn't your typical graphic novel. The story isn't told through panels and speech bubbles so much as full page Picasso-esque paintings. I wanted to cut pages out with an Exacto knife and hang them on my wall, that's how beautiful they were. In this case, the text of the book was overshadowed by the quality of the accompanying images. Still, Redniss did some really cool things with the story, like linking the relationship between the Curies to Marie's own writings about the chemical properties of radioactive materials.

Still, I worry that the pictures aren't enough to carry less-than-riveting story. The text could have used a little more punch and excitement to compliment the stunning imagery to hook more reluctant historians.

Final Grade: B