In the crumbling lakeside town of Echo Ferry, eleven-year-old Nix Navarro sweeps up confetti at his abuela Reina's dusty magic shop, the Velvet Herring. One night, a rabbit tumbles out of a splintered trunk without a hat—and without a way home. The rabbit, calling itself Calico, flickers at the edges like a half-finished card trick and insists its missing top hat is not an accessory but a key: the anchor to a vanished act by a legend, the Magnificent Harlan.
With Loa, a retired escape artist who knots laundry behind the shop, and Dahlia, a wind-up card dealer rescued from a shuttered riverboat casino, Nix tracks the hat across a map of oddities: the Umbra Arcade under the ferry docks, a midnight auction run by the Gilded Gala, and the Museum of Impossible Objects where props are kept humming by bottled applause. As the trio searches, they learn they are not the only ones unmoored—Nix's own memories have gaps shaped like silk flowers, and Calico's heartbeat syncs with the drum of a trick called the Severed Sky. The deeper they go, the more they suspect the hat is not lost at all; it is being used to trap the will of performers who would not fit the Gala's glittering mold. Can Nix, Calico, and Dahlia unmask the ringleaders and free the magic that has been caged, or will they be folded into the act and disappear between panels?
Echo Ferry works like a stage: light is channeled, secrets are stored in trapdoors, and the town remembers its acts whether the performers do or not. The Umbra Arcade, the Gilded Gala's auction, and the Museum of Impossible Objects all hum with rules you can feel from panel to panel, especially the eerie idea of applause as fuel. By the time the Severed Sky is named, the stakes read as more than spectacle, and the world feels bent but stable enough to hold the consequences.
Under the tricks, this is about gatekeeping and belonging, about who gets to define a career and who holds the keys. Nix's gaps and Calico's heartbeat mirror performers squeezed into a sheen they never chose.
Sometimes the message speaks a little too plainly, yet images like "props kept humming by bottled applause" carry a sting. The book nudges young readers toward questioning spectacle without losing the fun of the chase.
Nix's tentative bravery, Calico's snappy blur of self-preservation, Loa's gentle misdirection, and Dahlia's clockwork patience click together with dialogue that sparks and quiets in exactly the right moments.
The layouts lean tall and narrow, stretching Echo Ferry into a vertical funhouse. I liked the restrained color wash around the Velvet Herring and the sooty grays under the docks. The palette keeps the magic tactile.
Structurally the quest hops like a card trick that reveals three turns at once. Some beats between Loa and Nix feel clipped, and a couple of museum sequences crowd too many captions per panel, yet the final pages land with clean visual logic.
A flickering rabbit, a missing hat, and a scavenger trail through Echo Ferry make this comic feel like a puzzle you can actually solve. A few scene transitions jitter, but the Umbra Arcade set piece is a gem.
