Japanese New Zealander comics artist Jem Yoshioka makes her middle-grade debut with the first book in the Folk Remedy series, an exhilarating, otherworldly adventure centering family legacy, loyalty, and friendship. Takeyama, "a sleepy town in the countryside," is home to Morimura's Apothecary. Their telephone is still quite new, a modern convenience young Maple appreciates, but her mother insists it's "a kitsune trick": "How can we trust it's really a human on the other end?" Maple tries again to convince Mother "the world is changing. We don't need those old [yōkai] stories anymore." But Mother teaches Maple the family secret: "every generation for the past 500 years has used this book to share their yōkai stories... we inherit the book, we learn from it... and we record our own experiences in it... so that the next generation can also learn." Mother also reveals that their lantern holds a yōkai who has been trapped inside for 300 years. Maple decides the lantern can substantiate her doubts: if "no yōkai comes out, I'll have proven to Mother that they don't exist." Except Ember emerges, angry and ready to leave.
Maple--her expressions, her humor, her tenacity--entertainingly dominates Yoshioka's panels as she struggles between centuries-old tradition and quickly changing modernity. Yoshioka varies her color palettes accordingly, reserving predominantly earth tones for Mother's world and relying on purples, pinks, and blues for glimpses of other realms, brightening and heightening the saturation the further Maple travels from home. The final page turn is exactly the kind of cliffhanger that will have audiences clamoring for Book Two. --Terry Hong