Review by Frank Plowright

It’s been a long and extremely strange journey for Al15 after she decided on impulse to take a courier ship to another world. She changed that world as seen in The Adventure Begins, while her persistence and integrity saved more people during Broken Dreams. Her experiences finish here.

Creator Steve De La Mare provides a single page recap at the start, enabling anyone to pick up this conclusion, be amazed at the art, and still keep up with what’s going on. After reading that there’s the shock of AL15 and her mother Cassy’s deaths being announced. It proves premature, but after reading the following few pages, is recontextualised with a sinister meaning. AL15 has learned much about her planet’s past that contradicts the official version handed down for centuries.

Also of relevance is that having introduced Al15’s mother, thoughts naturally turn to her father. Al15 just believes him missing, but Cassy considers him dead. There’s little time to contemplate that before a big change.

Home Truth is straightforward when compared to the two previous volumes, almost a standard space adventure of the Star Wars type, with the eccentric droid already introduced. However, De La Mare’s artwork remains anything but standard, as ambitious as it’s been throughout in presenting gorgeously drawn people in impressively rendered locations. Tricks include ghost images for flashbacks, characters zipping off the side of a page and flying cabbages. Twisting and rickety wooden slatted passages with ropes to hold onto are about the only digital wonders that don’t convince.

Around three-quarters of the way through readers who’ve followed Al15’s journey through the previous two books will start to wonder how the hell De La Mare is even going to finish what he’s set up in Home Truth, never mind the entire series. He does, cleverly and in glorious fashion and in a compact way the De La Mare who embarked on the opening volume wouldn’t have managed. It’s not only Al15 who’s grown during her journey.

Over three volumes, though, Al15 has offered constant imaginative surprises and constant joy. It’s a delight.