Publisher's Weekly Review
Evildoers of Friendly Falls beware: Lola's Super Club lies ready to defend her home with the power of imagination. Super-Lola uses ballet to evade capture, and a pencil and eraser to alter space; her companion Super-James, a thong-clad toy dinosaur, can alter his size. Together, along with Hot Dog the cat and others, they stand against the villain Max Imum and his hench-dogs, who believe that Lola's father is secret agent James Blond (never confirmed). Both stories collected in this volume--"My Dad Is a Super Secret Agent" and "My Mom Is Lost in Time"--follow a similar premise: Max Imum kidnaps Lola's parents, spurring her to pursue and resulting in myriad developments that move the emphasis away from the protagonist's character and toward absurd occurrences in time and space. Fouillet's thin line work packs each panel with characters and details, which frequently compete for attention, but the art demonstrates skillful stylistic consistency amid varying subjects, including humans, animals, skeletons, and scribble monsters. Throughout Beigel's plot-driven story, Lola remains a charming and earnest protagonist, one whom readers can root for. Ages 7--12. Agent: Travis Pennington, the Knight Agency. (Dec.)
Kirkus Review
When her parents aren't looking, a girl and her toys go on secret-agent adventures in this duo of French graphic stories bound together for publication in the U.S. Lola is convinced her perfectly ordinary stay-at-home dad, Robert Darkhair, is secret agent James Blond. Whether he is or not is almost irrelevant; what's important is that mustachioed archvillain Max Imum believes it, too. Thus Lola dons a cape and mask (the former cut from her bedroom curtains) and hares off on a series of joyfully chaotic adventures to thwart the villain and rescue whichever parent has most recently been kidnapped. In both of the short tales collected here ("My Dad Is a Super Secret Agent" and "My Mom Is Lost in Time"), Lola is assisted by her cat and a collection of toys and drawings, most of which become person-sized and animate whenever her parents aren't looking. The excitement proceeds at breakneck pace, as Lola and her friends are propelled from frying pan to fire and back to frying pan every few pages. The adventures, translated from the French, don't make the trans-Atlantic hop altogether smoothly. One sequence is an extended homage to the Asterix comics that relies on familiarity with same. Nonstop silliness and lively use of the form will propel most readers through jokes lost in translation. Harder to overlook are the hackneyed representations of race, especially when mute "Mayans, Incas, or Aztecs" serve Max Imum, who threatens human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl. Main human characters all seem to be White. There's pleasurably messy, madcap humor, but the casually dismissive cultural representations are très désagréables. (Graphic fantasy/adventure. 7-10) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.