A fresh reimagining of Wonder Woman’s origin story.

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley. Trigger warning for violence against women and children, including street harassment, human trafficking, and allusions to rape.)

Princess Diana’s sixteenth Born Day party is well underway when the barrier guarding Themyscira from the human world ruptures, allowing several rafts filled with scared refugees ashore. In keeping with the Five Mothers’ decree, Queen Hippolyta is content to care for those who make it to shore, nursing them to health, only to send them back into the world they fled – after administering a forgetting serum, of course. But further Amazonian intervention is prohibited until the mysterious “Great Evil of the Universe” returns.

So when a raft packed with men, women, and children threatens to capsize at sea, Diana rushes to their aid. Though she’s still coming into her powers, this Changeling-Amazon is plenty strong enough to pull the raft to Themyscira … that is, if the barrier didn’t do such an excellent job of shielding it from the outside world, which is where Diana now finds herself.

Along with her comrades, Diana eventually winds up in an immigration camp in Greece, where her ability to speak literally every language makes her an emissary of sorts. She quickly catches the eyes of Steve and Trevor Chang (side note: I love love love the recasting of Steve Trevor as a gay couple!), who use their UN connections to get Diana a U.S. student visa and temporary housing in NYC.

Diana becomes fast friends with her pseudo guardian, Henke, but Henke’s granddaughter Raissa proves harder to win over. Diana loves helping Raissa in her volunteer work – providing free lunches to kids during the summer months, and tending to the community’s green spaces – even if it introduces her to some of the harsher realities of life in the human world: street harassment, homelessness, corporate greed, human trafficking, and sexual violence. When one of her young friends goes missing, it’s time for Diana to break out the lasso of truth and get to superheroing.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love DC’s YA imprint, because it makes a nice entry point for relative newbies like myself. But Wonder Woman is a bit of an exception, both for me and as a whole: I’m already familiar with some of DC’s Wonder Woman titles (most notably the New 52), and she’s such a huge part of popular culture, that I don’t think you can help but have some passing knowledge of her mythos. That’s not to say I don’t love and adore Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed – just for slightly different reasons.

For starters, there’s the storytelling; it’s lovely and urgent and exactly what you’d expect from Laurie Halse Anderson. In keeping with the progressive bent of DC’s YA titles, Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed gives Wonder Woman’s origin story a fresh spin that incorporates a number of pressing contemporary social issues. Chief among them is the plight of immigrants and refugees, a group that includes Wonder Woman herself. Cut off from her homeland, unable to return, Diana is a young woman without a country or family…at least not one that exists in this world. She’s special, sure, but also one of millions: just one face in the huddled masses. Absent her warrior tribe, Diana must learn how best to harness her powers to help lift up others.

The theme of alienation also hangs heavy: as the only child born on Themyscira, Diana isn’t like her Amazon sisters. She’s (comparatively) weak, frail, and prone to mood swings and inexplicable crying fits. Her body frequently betrays her. She’s a (shudder) teenager – on an island filled with ageless, immortal warrior women. The indignity of it all! But if she feels like she doesn’t quite fit in on Themyscira, Diana is truly out of her element in Greece and NYC, where capitalism is a death cult that reigns supreme.

I really enjoyed watching Diana Prince adapt to her new life, making friends, mastering parkour, and beating on street harassers. Raissa and Henke are interesting characters as well, but mostly take a backseat to a young Wonder Woman (as does almost everyone, or so one must assume).

The ending is a little improbable, in that the two big bad plotlines converge so neatly, and yet. Maybe it’s no so outlandish after all. The one percenters have all but become cartoon villains these days.

The artwork is lovely, and I especially loved those scenes set on Themyscira. (Hippolyta & Co., living the dream. Although the scene where she kicked a refugee in the face was unexpectedly harsh and dark. I wonder if we’ll get some backstory there?)

And the final pages, where Diana and her new family celebrate Henke’s boyfriend’s naturalization? TEARS.

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