The Professor’s Daughter by by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert (amazon.com)

I’ve had this book for weeks and for some reason I kept carrying it around in my purse without reading it. I ended up reading it while I was in a doctor’s waiting room, and it proved to be a perfect distraction from my less than pleasant surroundings. The professor’s daughter Lillian goes on an outing with the mummy Imhotep. They listen to music in Kensington and partake in afternoon tea, but Imhotep hasn’t consumed any food or drink in thousands of years. Imhotep quickly becomes drunk and boisterous after a couple sips, dancing with a portly gentleman at the tea house who doesn’t react well to being manhandled by a mummy. This is the first in a series of alarming events involving accidental poisoning, kidnapping, another mummy, the barriers to a romantic relationship between Lillian and Imhotep, and an appearance by Queen Victoria.
The art is charming. Imhotep is in bandages throughout most of the book, but you can see his regard for Lillian through his body language. The delicate watercolors sometimes shift to a dominant color to emphasize a particular scene. When Lillian is on a ship, everything is rendered in shades of green and a prison scene is a chilly blue-grey. I can tell that The Professor’s Daughter is going to end up on my shelf of comfort reading material, because if I’m feeling like I’m about to come down with a cold, I’m sure I’ll be cheered up by revisiting this story about a daring Englishwoman and her mummy companion.

A preview is available on the First Second web site.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.