Cathleen's Reviews > Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On

4.5 stars. A story that marinates in the strange beauty of melancholy, even as it plucks at the self-created burdens we carry through our years.

That's the thing about the past. It's gone. Just because it forms us, it doesn't mean you have to let it define you forever. You gotta take all that stuff that's formed you, and you have to use it. You can't let it use you.

Lemire is hardly the first to frame that insight, but in the context of this struggling family - struggling both as individuals and as unit - it isn't trite as much as it is signpost for claiming agency. It's the end of a journey. It is also the beginning of one. Or should be.

The conclusion proffers more resolution than anticipated, and that may be the source of my wavering on that last full star. I want hope for these characters, but hope tempered with reality. Tidy doesn't quite satisfy, even as it pains me to articulate for a series that has had such profound effect. I champion the elegiac, conflicted, reflective tone that permeates each chapter, especially as underscored by illustration style and intentional scaling of frames. The concern is that this seems compromised by the choice to allow a single/shared epiphany to wave toward a now-that's-all-behind-us presumption. We leave with a bit of a whimper - an artful one, make no mistake, but a whimper nonetheless.