Review: "Lost in Taiwan" by Mark Crilley

Lost in Taiwan by Mark Crilley
Published May 2023 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

In which a jaded teenaged boy is sent to Taiwan to stay with his brother, only he finds himself lost and with no way home...

I found this to be...okay. I've never been to Taiwan and like reading books set in places I've never visited, so this was something of a no-brainer. Plus, I liked some things about Crilley's art in My Last Summer with Cass, and art can make or break a graphic novel.

But the plot felt kind of...teenage boy wet dream? Like, I can see what Paul sees in Peijing: She's cute and nice and drives a little too fast and is happy to shepherd him around and show him the best of Taiwan and put up with his ignorance and flirt with him. But I have a harder time seeing what Peijing sees in Paul. Granted, the reader sees more of him than Peijing does—we see that at the beginning of the book, he's a rude dweeb who is hell-bent on throwing away the chance to explore part of a foreign country. He's polite to Peijing, and fairly quickly starts to see the value of new experiences, but other than Paul saying "yes, go for your dreams"...what is she getting out of their budding relationship? She's getting a boy who calls her "exotic" and thinks it's a compliment (though he does recognize the error of his ways and apologize); a boy who admits that he puts no effort into relationships and instead cuts out the moment things get rough; a boy who is foreign and thus perhaps exciting to her but really doesn't seem to bring much else to the table.

The art is indeed pretty (though I don't really understand why Peijing's irises are often so much bigger than Paul's—the Disney effect, where hot girls have enormous eyes and the boys have normal eyes?). The glimpse at Taiwan is nice, and I read this while visiting my in-laws in India, so I could relate to some of the cultural disconnects. But...the plot is thin, and Paul's character development is too abrupt for me to trust that it'll last. Nice little romance for them, but hopefully it fizzles out and Peijing can find herself someone who knows better to think that his culture is the "normal" one and hers is the "exotic" one.