Bone Book 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith

Bone Book 2: The Great Cow Race

HarperCollins

I missed the boat when the independent comic book series Bone came out - It proved a tremendous critical and sales success, and has subsequently been collected by various publishers internationally.

Beginning from Book 2 of the collections isn't the ideal way to begin, but let's put it this way: it's a fantasy tale, lighthearted and fun for the most part, but with something of a quest or curse unrevealed as its underlying mystery.

Declaring that but then being asked to describe what its proves to be something a dichotomy - I can say classic Walt Disney films, Walt Kelly's Pogo newspaper strip, Al Capp's Li'l Abner newspaper, and some of the characters look a bit like if Charles Vess had inked Frank Frazetta.

Bone himself looks some cross between Caspar the Friendly Ghost and Cerebus the Aardvark with a bit of Mickey Mouse's personality. If I read another book in the series I could be proved completely wrong.

Bone's an odd little white creature with a big nose, as are the other people from where he comes from. And two of them are in this book. One's a numbskull, the other's a grifter, card shark and cheating so-and-so... Which is why they're trying to get people not to get the townsfolk not to bet against Granny winning a race against a herd of cows.

Yes, you read that right. And it's an annual event.

Add to this the fact that Bone's in love with the old lady's granddaughter Thorn, and there are monsters lurking for reasons unknown on the edge of town.

I realise a lot of what I've just written could be confusing, but the book itself is easy to get into, being self-contained enough as a collection, funny, and while there's a library sticker on the cover I've got promoting it as fit for "Boys into Books", girls will enjoy it just as much, adults too.