Abbie is the heroine of Nilah Magruder’s webcomic M.F.K., but she doesn’t want to be a hero. She just wants to carry her late mother’s ashes to their final resting place and live a quiet life. But in a land where sleeping gods are starting to wake, life can’t be quite for a girl with earth-moving superpowers.
Jaime is a young man living in the once-prosperous town of Little Marigold with his aunt, a physician, and his grandfather, a glass worker. Life in the depressed desert town is dull and grim, at least until he discovers an injured girl attempting to travel through a sandstorm. That girl is Abbie, a mostly deaf stranger who refuses to talk about her past. Jaime is intrigued by anyone from the outside, especially since his own parents left Little Marigold long ago.
But just because Abbie is in the isolated Little Marigold doesn’t mean that life has become sleepy. Renegade parapsi, people with unusual abilities, plague defenseless towns like this. And while the gods have long been absent from the world, they are merely sleeping — and some have started to wake. Abbie’s life is going to be an interesting one, whether she likes it or not.
M.F.K. is a bit slow to get started, especially since the initial premise (a stranger with a mysterious past is found on the outskirts of a small town where they are nursed back to health) is a familiar one. But once Magruder starts hinting at the comic’s wider mysteries and opening up her world (with its interesting mix of technology), it’s clear that there’s a lot of fun to be had — even if it’s largely at Abbie’s expense.
[M.F.K.]