**Thanks to publisher and Netgalley for quickly providing me this graphic novel in exchange for a honest review**

I appreciate that the art was really colourful and easy on eyes but it’s just the text needed for the speeches needed a lot of squinting (yes I am a blind hag who wears glasses) to understand what was happening and felt really long for me to become interested.

I really loved the art for this, and the story was quite powerful. Honestly teared up a bit when they discovered the tomb. The ending kind of threw me though, I sort of expected something different I guess, or maybe a bit more tension. A lovely read anyway.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley.

It's 2001, and Teresa, a young Italian suffering from insomnia and a generally fragile state of mind, has just arrived in Berlin with a grant to help organize an exhibit of Tutankhamen's treasure. Though she finds support in Ruben, a fellow Italian expat, she struggles to keep it together. Her one anchor is reading Howard Carter's book about his discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922, finding solace in the Egyptologist's writing and the thought of that noble young pharaoh resting undisturbed for three thousand years.

This is beautifully drawn, with a fine romantic gloss on the Tut sections and a spare, restrained, but expressive, treatment of our heroine. Her story is understated and the Tut story is well known, so the book sort of flows slowly and surely and predictably.

1.5/5

Thank you to the author and the publisher for putting this title as a "read now" on NetGalley.

Unfortunately, I didn't get it.
I tried, but no.
I didn't get what all this meant, I didn't get where the plot was going, I didn't get the purpose of the book and I didn't get the whole Egypt parallelism.

The art felt like a painting so it was visually good, even if not my favorite.

I'm sad, but oh well :(

Archaeology always reminds me of the movie, The Mummy franchise. I really love the movie. Oh, and Indiana Jones.

While this graphic novel, Hypericon has dual timeline setting - 1920s and 2000s - one when a group of archaeology has found King Tut's tomb and Teresa, who is an archaeologist with severe insomnia arrives in Berlin with a grant to help to organize an exhibition of King Tut's treasure.

"If we had a destination we were headed for, we would never get there in a straight line."

I love the few pages towards the ending - the meaning, st. john's wort, the connection and all. But what I don't love is when there were German & Spanish languages were thrown off without any translation, and the german word I understand was, Guten Morgen. So I skipped german/spanish interactions.

Mind you that there were few graphic of sex scenes.

I think I will try other Manuele Fior's work.

I live in Berlin, so half of why I enjoyed this book came purely from the feeling of familiarity that it gave me. I liked the art style and the text font a lot too. It was a pleasant, quick read.

However, I didn't like Teresa or Ruben much, and I don't think I quite understood what the story was trying to convey. I also didn't particularly like the decision by the author/artist to not provide English translations for the German and Spanish dialogues. If I didn't know a little bit of German, I would have easily got frustrated.

Thank you Netgalley and the Europe Comics for the advance reader copy of this book. It is always a pleasure to read a graphic novel published by Europe Comics.

In 1922, Egyptologist Howard Carter (white and British, of course) is on the brink of the discovery of a lifetime—Tutankhamen's intact tomb. In 2001, Teresa is fresh off the plane in Berlin, ready to start what is, for her, the opportunity of a lifetime—an assistantship working on an exhibition of the treasures in that tomb.

In Berlin, Teresa quickly develops a double life: in one life, she is a high-achieving, motivated professional, the consummate employee. In her other life, she is living in a squat with Ruben, a man about whom she knows little other than that his life is something of an antithesis to the ordered routine she's always followed. This is a Berlin that doesn't fully exist anymore—where the squatters haven't been evicted, and you can tell the former East and West Berlin by the smell of coal, and war-torn (and Soviet) buildings are still being torn down and rebuilt. Teresa mostly slots right in, falling into this odd relationship that she tells us is unusual for her (and then setting about trying to make Ruben change into something more appropriate).

I read this for the setting and the cover, mostly. As it turns out, the art style doesn't really match the cover—the cover is far more detailed, realistic, and painting-like than most of the rest of the book. In places, especially in the wider shots of scenes set in Egypt, the art is like fresh watercolors; elsewhere, it tends to be a bit simpler. (I would have liked to know Teresa's age, because going by appearance she could be anywhere between 20 and 45.) I love the color palette, though, and especially the scenes featuring graffiti.

Parts of this, then, I really liked, like the view of punk Berlin and the look at the excavation (in particular, I loved the way the tomb map repeats throughout the story, getting more detailed as the excavation team learns more). But I don't really understand Teresa and Ruben, both of whom do get something akin to personality grafts near the end of the book, and whose relationship seems largely based on (quite explicit) sex. There's not enough of a plot outside their relationship to feel much in the way of stakes otherwise, which puts a lot of pressure on a relationship that I don't fully understand. And while I'm sure there's significance to Teresa finally overcoming her chronic insomnia just in time for (trying to avoid spoilers here) the big crisis at the end of the book, I'm not sure what that significance *is*, so the crisis ended up feeling a bit...arbitrary, or voyeuristic, or something. I'm glad I read this, but I'm not sure what to take away from it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance of reading this graphic novel.

Firstly I would say the idea and concept of this sounded very interesting and yet, the story itself left a lot to be desired.
The main character Theresa is an insomniac and that appears to be the extent we ever go with her. She gets herself a lover and is also researching but the story felt unfinished and also weirdly rushed.

I enjoyed the art style, it felt very whimsical and free flowing, very against the partially volatile Theresa.
I would have liked more from the story, and feel like there was meant to be some big philosophical message; but it didn’t quite hit for me.

As an archaeologist I was interested to see this take on the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb from a very different perspective, and to enjoy the other story around it. Generally it was an enjoyable experience - I didn't dislike what I saw - but I just found it lacked drive? There was nothing that seemed to be taking the story forward apart from the fact that there were more pages to fill.

The art style was beautiful however, I really did enjoy the illustrations and the way the book was laid out - I just found there was only half a plot.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

I feel like this graphic novel was meant to have a deeper meaning that just flew right over my head. You learn practically nothing about Teresa, except that she's an archeologist with severe insomnia. Rueben, you find out that he is an Italian like Teresa and is living like a bohemian. I did find the flips between Teresa's present and the other archeologist team in the 1920s to be interesting, but it took me reading the synopsis to realize the perspective switch was supposed to be what Teresa reading in her book. There are a lot of short sex scenes in this graphic novel. I won't lie, I did sigh and think to myself "Here we go again with the French obsession with sex and shoving it in all of their comics". I think they were meant to show that Teresa's and Reubens's relationship is mostly physical in the beginning, but it felt like it was tossed in just to add drama. I will also say that the random German and Spanish being thrown in, with no translation on the bottom of the page, was very aggravating. It wasn't one-off words or phrases either, it was full-blown sentences. I don't like reaching for my translator and painfully typing it all in by hand, so I mostly ignored the non-English parts. I know a handful of words in German and Spanish, so I got part of what was being said. But it really threw me out of the story every time it happened and I sat there trying to remember what a word meant in German. I get it, they're in Germany, but a small translation note would do wonders for story flow. The cheeky "I know you don't understand a word" at the end was a really irritating poke in the eye of the reader. I would also point out that the font used for the 1920s portion was hard to read. I understand it's meant to evoke handwritten notes, but I shouldn't have to squint to understand what was written. For all my complaints, the art style of this novel I loved. It's this beautiful style that makes it feel more like a painting. I will admit, the expressions are sort of dull, and very limited. I swear to God, Teresea only makes faces that are equivalent to the 0_0 emoji, but the rest of the art makes up for it. I won't put my thoughts on the spoilers here since there's no way to hide them here, but I will put them on my GR. All I will say is that the plot synopsis says that the story is set in 2001 for a reason.