I don't know where to start in reviewing Bayou. I don't think this is going to be a review as much as a glorification.

I'll start with something I didn't really notice until I finished and I was flipping through all the pages: the LIGHT. Underwater. Yellow sunlight. Red-orange sunset. Pink dawn. The black of a jail cell. Murky brown at the bayou. Blue to carry a shotgun across the field.

This is a beautiful story to look at, often at the same time it's horrifying.

I want to claim that Bayou, at least as of this first volume, isn't fantasy as much as magical realism. The fantastic elements aren't part of normal life (except insofar as they're the gigantic iridescent shadows of normal life) but neither are they more terrifying or abnormal to Lee, the protagonist, than those parts of her reality that she must deal with at the side of her father or other adult relatives.

My favorite pages are those on which we see Lee through Bayou's eyes. In one, as she prepares to do something Bayou hasn't the courage for, she isn't wearing her patched dress but a flowing gown and gold around her neck and in her ears and hair. Later, when she cries for Bayou to help her, he sees her straining against a chain. Whom is Bayou remembering?