Janina Scarlet PhDRecensioni

DNF. Just make it a damn mental health manual and forgo the gloss of a story altogether. And get better artists. This looks like it was drawn by a sixth grader. At least a sixth grader can improve.

Dark Agents by Janina Scarlet,PhD is a therapy/comic book dealing with issues of PTSD & Depression aimed at teenagers. I applaud the effort & I like that the author is trying to present these real world problem in a way teens might engage with. I think this comic has potential but a few things kept it from being a hit with me. The art is colorful but basic which seems aimed more toward younger teens but the dialog gets a bit long in places which seems misplaced for a younger teen. A little more "action" in the Art, especially the backgrounds & a little lighter, or broken down into smaller bites, on the dialog would make this interesting concept more readable.Received as part of the Librarything Early Reviewers for my honest opinion.

This book is an interesting take on helping children work through traumatic events. The authors' use of the graphic novel format is a good choice; I think kids would be much more likely to pick up a graphic novel about a girl with super powers than something more akin to an adult self-help book. While it won't win an Eisner, I think Dark Agents achieves its goal, and I would recommend it to anyone helping a young person suffering from PTSD.

This graphic novel is meant to provide a way for young people who have suffered from trauma to understand their history and work toward a healthy live. Using a story about superhero types fighting evil, it attempts to explain what trauma is and what those who have experienced it might feel or act like because of it. Further it tries to offer techniques like mindfulness and acceptance/commitment therapy to help those sufferers cope. All are good goals but this book as a whole misses the mark. The story is not well flushed out, the characters are not fully constructed (therefore confusing) and this reader didn't come to care about any of them. The "message" part of the story is hard hitting and sounds like a lecture or therapy session not like a superhero story. Although well intentioned, I don't think it hits the mark for an interesting series that a casual, not traumatized young person would want to read.

Synopsis: Violet's parents are murdered by a necromancer when she is a child, leaving her to learn her craft from her grandfather as they go into hiding. When she turns 19, she goes into training to become a Dark Agent. Her goal is to take revenge on the person who killed her parents; however, her success is threatened by her inability to deal with her early trauma.
Review: This graphic novel is actually a manual for children who have PTSD. The illustrations are excellent. But while the therapy may be well grounded in psychological practice, the story is thin and disjointed. I kept waiting for the story to develop, however it never did.

This is a very interesting concept for a young adult graphic novel, it is a fantasy tale about a young witch that has been through a lot of trauma, so the main focus of the book is also about that trauma and how to deal with and overcome it. So the below review is focused on the fact that this book is to be used as a teaching tool, probably for therapists and the like.

Violet is a witch who has lost her family to an evil Necromancer who is stealing souls of powerful witches, she has also been in his line of fire (literally) as well. She is determined to avenger her family and find the Necromancer, so she is enlisted in training for the Dark Agents, the FBI/CIA of the supernatural realm of this book. The book combines mythology with other supernatural characters as well as a teen drama, it is a fun little package. As Violet learns to cope and understand her emotions she becomes better equipped to take on her new life as a Dark Agent and try to help then track this notorious killer.

The overall theme of helping was very prominent. Full spreads on mindfulness and grounding yourself in order to better understand and pull back your emotions in order to center or recenter yourself. The book notes that this is called ACT - acceptance and commitment therapy. I found it to be very insightful and believe that this book will be a good teaching tool for counselors, therapists and the like. It is done in a way that works well with the plot of this story and the characters, but I think that the teens that read it might also need a nudge in order to use the methods discussed in the book.

At times the methods used seemed to disconnect the reader form the plot (at least that was my feeling). I think that it could have been embedded better but in the overall story they seem to make sense.

Some overall thoughts, as a book not focused on emotional trauma, it was not that wonderful. It seemed a little throw together AROUND the therapeutic elements. However, as I mentioned, as a teaching tool this might be a very helpful type of read for young adults dealing with emotional issues, trauma, or that just need this type of therapy.

I received this book for free from Early Reviewers. While I loved the illustrations, the story was a bit confusing. The rest of my review is on the link below.

My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QtmqZF9f2E

Enjoy!½

I found this book confusing.

The graphic novel was slow starting, but once they got to it the story started to flow. The "therapy tools" thrown into the comic were obvious and did not blend well with the story. I understand what the author was trying to do, but she should have let it stay simple instead of turning it into over-explanation of the treatment.

The story also showed the main character making the breakthrough the book wanted but never showed her getting there believably.

As a survivor of trauma, I think it is a good idea, just overly clinical in the follow through.

As an educational pamphlet about PTSD, mindfulness, and working through trauma, "Dark Agents" is about 60 pages too long. Unfortunately, as a graphic novel, it's also about 60 pages too long.

The intentions behind creating this book seem valuable: providing "elements of a powerful treatment called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)" as described on the back cover. And the most coherent elements of the narrative are when a professor lectures on mindfulness. The road to Hell, however, is paved with better intentions than these.

The writing is poor. World building is slapdash, hurried, and irrelevant. Characters float in and out of the narrative with no seeming purpose. Character development is unmotivated and random; choices have no consequences, individuals have no agency. Dialogue is painful, without nuance, identity, development, or purpose. Plot is driven by contrivance. The educational elements are useful from a real-world perspective, but are heavy-handed, clumsy and poorly integrated into the story.

The art is amateurish and weak. Characters are difficult to differentiate. Backgrounds are non-existant or drab. Page structure is ill-suited to the narrative. Panel design is monotonous and dull. The color palette is flat. Nothing sparkles, nothing engages, nothing jumps off the page.

All-in-all, it seems like the entire book was written based off a good idea for a 4-page pamphlet. Then the project ballooned without increasing any investment in either the writing or the art. If the amount of effort that went into the creation of this long-form story had been applied to a short-form one-shot it would probably be really solid.

I mentioned that the lectures had real-world value. They do. I was able to relate much better to someone who had recently gone through a traumatic experience after reading the book.

This was a book I got a review copy of. It's a graphic novel that seems mainly designed to teach young people how to deal with emotional trauma. I suspect that if you want it for that purpose, it's fine.

However, I am not a young person who needs help coping with emotional trauma, so I can only review it as a regular reader. As a regular reader, it's not very good at all. The plot is paper thin, about a witch whose parents are killed in front of her by a necromancer. She vows revenge, and years later joins a supernatural police force run by Hades. The bulk of the book is about her classes, which surprisingly seem to mostly deal with controlling your emotions instead of the best ways to punch a demon in the face, which would seem to be more useful. The boring plot isn't helped at all by the ridiculously stilted dialogue.

Since this is a graphic novel, I should also talk about the art. There are a lot of talented artists working in comics today, but the person who did this isn't one of them. The character designs are terrible. Even the characters who are supposed to look human, are oddly shaped and mostly so similar that at times I can barely tell which is which. Then there's the fact that most of the story seems to take place in a weird, formless void consisting only of colors and shades of color because the artist couldn't be bothered to draw backgrounds for about 90% of the book.

This would definitely be a book to pass on if you want to read it for pleasure.

A supernatural graphic novel that deals with PTSD in a way that teens could understand. I think that was the purpose of the story and it worked well. I wasn’t’ a fan of the way the characters were drawn but the artwork was very good. Violet is a nineteen year old dealing with her own demons and hopes that being accepted into the Underworld Intelligence Agency will hope her cope with the death of her parents and deal with her fear of death. It is a story with a therapeutic purpose and didn’t take away the story.

Did author Janina Scarlet run at the wall of Platform 9¾ a little too hard? She seems a little dazed.

This book is an attempt to use Harry Potter-related themes to supply psychological help. It's an interesting idea, but the implementation has difficulties which perhaps make it less effective.

For starters, it suffers from a deficiency that is almost universal in Potter-themed books: Too much forced Potter content. This ranges from the slightly imperfect comparison to the flat-out goof. As an example of the former, p. 124 compares psychoactive medications with healing potions, which is invalid -- the Potter potions heal you, so that you're done with them, but the psychoactive medications, almost without exception, only treat you, and must be continued indefinitely. More extreme is page 119, which offers us the Marauders' Map as a life plan -- but it isn't a life plan, it's a source of information. There are many more, some more irritating than others.

I'm more picky than most, but this sort of bogus parallel makes it nearly impossible for me to really use the lessons in the book.

There is also a confusion of values and desires. Pages 102-103 suggest that being a Harry Potter fan is a value -- something to be striven for to make the world better. It isn't; it's just something that people desire and enjoy. There is nothing wrong with pursuing things you enjoy -- but once you start confusing them with values, you're sure to have problems. We don't all have the same values -- but, surely, going to Potter conventions is not something that will solve the world's problems! On which point -- why do all the personal stories Scarlet invokes have to involve being excessively Potter-headed? In particular, why are the first two examples both Slytherins? My ambition is not to be excessively ambitious! And, again, Harry Potter fandom is not a value!

The book isn't all bad. There is some very nice material on page 64 about natural versus manufactured emotions -- and, there, her Potter examples work. It's too bad Scarlet didn't take this part of her own work as a model for the rest.

One other warning: The book really only addresses two psychological conditions, anxiety and depression. There are plenty of characters whose conditions this book cannot help. Gilderoy Lockhart has classic symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (he cares only for himself, he doesn't realize his own defects, he ignores others' needs). Voldemort surely has antisocial personality disorder. Ron has a phobia of spiders. Even Hermione... if she were real, I'd interview her for autism. She has significant anxiety, but in addition she is a perfectionist, she has splinter skills and an exceptional memory, she likes routines, she is emotionally fragile, and she sometimes has trouble with people. Even Harry and Ron think she's strange in her interests. (And, for the record, all those things make her my favorite character, by far, in the Potter books. I don't want to change Hermione. I just want her to realize that that slacker Ron isn't her type.😉) For that matter, there is nothing here for bipolar disorder -- the condition many suspect J. K. Rowling herself experiences.

There is nothing really wrong with that. Most self-help books are directed at anxiety and depression, because, first, they are the most common psychological conditions, and, second, they are among the most straightforward to treat. (It's very hard to treat narcissistic personality disorder, for instance, because the people who suffer it refuse to admit there is anything wrong with them.) But it would be better if this book made it clearer what it is and is not for.

You can't clear psychological conditions with a magic wand. Therapy (possibly combined with medication, depending on the condition) is the best option. But sometimes that's not possible. This book is better than nothing. A lot better. I just wish it didn't grate so much.