An interesting look at 2020 and the Covid 19 pandemic through sketches and writing.

The book is written as 2020 and the pandemic unfolds, so there is no real story or ending.

The real highlight of this book are the illustrations.

The journal is a time capsule of how this artist felt living through 2020 and he does manage to find some humor in those dark days.

The content of this story was interesting, but the layout made it somewhat difficult to read. However, it was very relateable and enjoyable!

An interesting look at 2020 and the Covid 19 pandemic through sketches and writing. The book is written as 2020 and the pandemic unfolds so there is no real story or ending. The real highlight of this book are the illustrations. The journal is a time capsule of how this artist felt living through 2020 and he does manage to find some humor in those dark days.

Vic Lee's Corona Diary 2020 is a personal diary / graphic novel focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

when i opened the book, i can say i was not prered for such great graphics with co-relation of our daily lives.

Lee chronicles this unprecedented period with hand-drawn typography and illustrations that displays the initial news from Wuhan and the eventual declaration of a global pandemic by WHO to the economic fallout. I consider this book to be a telling book filled with details that are collectively-felt emotions and experiences.

It is a stimulating book. Due to being on the Spectrum, it is a bit over-stimulating for me. However, I feel like this book is necessary to read. It certainly made me feel less isolated.

•Character development- 4☆
• Story Plot- 3☆
• Flow of the story- 4☆
• Overall - 3.5☆

I really enjoyed this book and the look back over the very strange year of 2020 that started out so well, or seemed too, that is before the Covid-19 pandemic really came in to its own.

This is a look back through Vic Lee's own journey and he has some of the best illustrations I have seen in this kind of book for a long time, they add so much to the book and really bring his journal to life.

It was easy to read and there were a few parts where looking back I did think, yes, he is right and I wonder if X, Y and Z had happened would things be any different - things we will never know.

It is 4 stars from me for this one, I read it in an evening and loved it - high recommended!

I wanted to like this book because it does capture the feeling of the first months of the pandemic quite well and the illustrations are great, but... but that's about it and I wanted a little bit more from a personal journal, not just a recounting of the pandemic.

Definitely not what Inwas expecting. The pages were extremely cramped but the story was well done.

3.5/5.

This interesting graphic journal of the Coronavirus is really interesting now but will be even more valuable as we get enough time away from this and our perspectives become more fully shaped. The art reminded me of classic, political cartoons mixed with, like, almost band posters. Each page is a full rendering of Lee’s thoughts and impressions as the pandemic unfolded across the world. It’s deeply personal and also a reflection of a global event.

The art is almost overwhelming at times, and I really appreciated that. It perfectly embodies the overwhelming feelings of people as things change daily and things we knew months ago seem like a lifetime ago.

It’s out on Tuesday, and I think I’ll be revisiting it in a year or two to see if my opinion changes, how my experiences this year will influence my thoughts about this work and the larger world.

The art in this graphic novel is very well done and very creative. However, the unique layout made it difficult for me to read and follow along.

I received this book as an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

The art in this journal/graphic novel was GORGEOUS and inspiring. It makes me want to try drawing again. The timeline itself in the book was hard to follow and I struggled with some of the font choice for lettering.

I think over the next six to twelve months we’re going to be seeing more of this kind of thing, diaries detailing the events of 2020 and the personal impact they’ve had upon the authors, or self-help books designed around surviving 2021 because, and let’s be brutally honest here, this is not going away any time soon, not until our governments and our populations can get their arses in gear and prioritise fighting it.

However, none of the books I imagine are going to come out are going to be anything like Vic Lee’s. This is because it’s not a “proper” diary, nor is it a graphic novel, despite being created using illustrations. You see, Lee is an artist who does a lot of murals and within the pages of his Corona Diary, he’s turned his skill at this kind of work into around 45 individual murals, all portioned out into double-page spreads. It’s a lovely looking thing (though the digital format in which I read my advanced copy didn’t do it any favours).

It’d be easy to write something morose, and though this journal only tells us the first six months of the year, during which things looked really, really bad and was genuinely terrifying, Lee still finds some room to insert some humour, I couldn’t help squirting coffee out of my nostrils when I read the phrase “Bojo Blaggins”, though he’s possibly ruined my next viewing of the Lord of the Rings movies.

Lee also opens by saying he’s tried to avoid inserting his own politics into the book, though this is something I think, ultimately, is impossible to do in the circumstances, it’s clear what he thinks of the likes of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and those who refuse to adhere to easy to follow guidelines such as “wear a mask”, but he does go to great effort to try and only report on the facts when discussing the world at large, whilst insert small anecdotes of his time in lockdown (including him repainting his bathroom).

Personally speaking, I’d have liked this to have been held off a little longer and cover the whole year and our battle with COVID-19, but I do hope we will get a second book, as this is an excellent and beautifully put together insight into January – June of 2020.

I don't know what I expected, but this was a rather messy--although very well crafted--comic-style diary of the pandemic and how it all began. I would've enjoyed it more if it weren't so cluttered text-wise and hard to follow. I didn't know where to look at, the pages were just too full of everything.

I couldn't finish this book, I had to put it down at 21%. The text was cluttered and there was no clear flow, the timeline was not clear (sometimes it was mentioning something that happened in march, then goes back to february).

I was hoping for something more emotionally engaging, to make my emotions validated during this year, not a showing of facts with bits of the author's activities during that time. Maybe the book delivers what I was looking for in the pages I have not read, but life's too short to keep reading something that is not engaging.

I think this book could be a cool guide in the future, where people who went though the crysis can remember what was like, and people who never did can see how this historical event was lived by in a day to day basis. Teachers can use it to educate young students, parents can remember it with their children. It'll be fun to see how this goes in a few years, but for now it just opened some wounds which were not fully healed yet :)

Wow. Just wow. This graphic novel is stunning in both illustrations and content. Stunning content as in wtf is wrong with the world and the staggering facts, figures and statistics of the Corona Virus. Stunning visually with bold black and white ink that decorates each page. This graphic novel chronicles major and lesser events from the start of the virus in January to about July of 2020. As an artist, Vic Lee's perspective on the virus made me both want to cry and smile at times. He shows the good (healthcare workers, frontline responders and general good deeds done), the bad (the stupidity of some people since Corona beer sales dropped, people trying to crash trains into ships, the loss of jobs) and the ugly (politics, the obsession with toilet paper, the disregard of mask and social distancing mandates).

Vic Lee is super talented artistically and obviously was staying up to date on daily news. As an American, it was interesting to see a British perspective on this global pandemic. I wish I had done a visual diary through "these unprecedented times" since it creates such a powerful statement. I am sure this will become a staple testament for this time in history.

As a teacher, I LOVE the ending of this novel. I very much want to use this in my classroom and have the open end spark students to start their own visual journal. This will pair nicely with 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson.

Vic Lee has done a fantastic job of memorializing this year and the horror of COVID.His drawing his storytelling make this a book that detail through illustrations the shocking sad year 2020 has been.A book that is perfect for everyone’s library to always remind us of this Covid year,#netgalley#quartoboks

I thought that this was very insightful and thought provoking. This journal/graphic novel kicks off from the beginning and makes some interesting and relatable observations about life during the pandemic. I thought the artwork was amazing and very interesting. It flows very well and takes your eye through the pages to pull together the experiences Vic Lee talks about. It also made looking at numbers and statistics interesting, so if you're not a fan of the statistics or political things (like myself, that stuff is scary) it's not something that is a very big part of the narrative. It's there, but it's not overwhelming.

Everyone has their own experiences having to do with the entire year of 2020 as a whole and especially with the pandemic, but I think that for the most part it feels universal - it really isn't if you get down to the nitty gritty. I liked this because it was a good reminder of that. As an American, it feels overwhelmingly American to only focus on what is happening in America and I was actually happy to see little of America discussed in this (and little of Tr*mp as well) because I already know the stats and how irresponsible and scary it is over here. I was happy with seeing a different perspective from someone non-American and to have a little occasional check in about other countries as well. It's sad but refreshing, but I think that it was done is a masterful way where it wasn't so scary, which I think is also part of the reason why other countries stats aren't looked at as much (especially by myself).

Overall, I don't think there are many if any faults with this journal, after all I cannot fault someone's experience. The fact that Lee even decided to share this, I applaud that. I feel like this is apart of history now and I'm so happy with that. I always ask "who writes history?" and I believe that this is a good answer to that question; us, we don't write history, we document it.

Vic Lee did a marvelous job of highlighting his experience with the Covid 19 pandemic. The visual diary starts just prior to the outbreak and continues to almost present day. He hits on a number of important political and social moves that impacted the spread or lack of spread of this novel virus. The artwork is visually stunning.

Thank you to NetGalley for access to an audiobook version of this in exchange for my honest review.

This book is an account of the COVID-19 Pandemic starting at the beginning of 2020 until about September. Looking back at the pandemic through Vic Lee's illustrations feels like stepping into a time warp. It's hard to believe that all of these things happened in the span of less than a year.

I love the sketchnote style this is laid out in; the combination of illustration and text really captures the weight of the moment. It also provides a fun juxtaposition of world news headlines and the mundane realities of staying safer at home.

If there is a complaint, it's that there is really no "end" since we're still living through this pandemic as of this review. It does lend itself well to a volume 2 down the road (hopefully not more than that, though).

This book is gorgeous Vic Lee's Art is something that I found myself zooming in to look closer at pieces. Because It is so intricate.
But I also found myself surprised by how far away January of this year feels, part of me feels like March was just a little while ago. But when confronted with the newslines we were hearing in January and February, as well as the early headlines of the pandemic. It's easy to realize how desensitized we have become to these headlines after nearly a year.

As an American it is also interesting to see how similarly and differently things affecting people living in a different country.

This is a wonderfully illustrated diary of the first 6 months of the Coronavirus. It was accurate of everything that happened. It was also was interesting to see the perspective of someone living in Europe, since I have lived in the mess of the United States. I would look for other books to see if the author continues through the duration of the virus.