Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic by Wauter Mannaert

Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic by Wauter Mannaert is a delightful graphic novel about a young girl named Yasmina. Yasmina and her father live on the top floor of an apartment building in Belgium. Yasmina loves to cook and typically makes delicious meals for her father, who works at a french fry restaurant. However, when a big potato farmer comes into town, all their plans change.

Tom de Perre, a potato farmer decides to take over Cyril and Marco’s farms, Yasmina isn’t able to get food anymore to feed her family. She can’t even go to the supermarket since the owners will only sell Tom de Perre’s potatoes, which Yasmina won’t buy because it causes madness that turns humans into believing they’re dogs.

Sadly, Yasmina has to resort to stealing food from her neighbor’s rooftop garden but stumbles upon a newspaper detailing the same illness that is taking over the city and a machine that looks like it might be the answer to the problem. Yasmina continues stealing from her neighbor, though when her own dad turns into a dog, she knows that it’s gone too far she enlists the help of her neighbor, Cyril, and Marco, to turn all the people in the city back to normal.

Yasmina cooks up a special recipe that would make all the people afraid of Tom de Perre’s dangerous potatoes and sets to work curing the residents of the city. The five of them (Yasmina, her neighbor, Cyril, Marco, and her dad) formulate a plan to break into Tom de Perre’s warehouse and spike all the potatoes with her special concoction.

I really enjoyed the techniques Mannaert used to illustrate this graphic novel. He used digital colors for most of it and a brush pen for the shadows and less realistic features. Another special treat is that Mannaert included his thought process, coloring, and more in the back of the graphic novel. Overall it was a quirky, but interesting read and a beautiful book.