Readers may have trouble swallowing, much less digesting, the tale’s more rococo elements, but both the tone and the...
A mysterious rash of broken clocks signals the (literal) rise of old horrors in this sly French import.
The action is as stylized as Fischer’s art-deco screen-print illustrations, which place semiabstract figures in claustrophobic cityscapes formed of geometric spaces, loud colors, glaring lights, and deep shadows. “This is my time,” begins the titular night watchman, self-assuredly setting off on his routine patrol with a lamp that looks inset into his cranium to provide illumination. But the appalling discovery that two of the city’s three towering clocks have been dismantled on his watch sends him on a long chase after a “Vagabond.” This turns out to be the night watchman’s predecessor—a robot who had in pre-clock Olden Times driven a plague of crocodilian nightmares down into the municipal sewers. The clocks’ destruction touches off a general riot, and then (with the narrative’s high-toned language pitching even further over the top) giant reptiles burst out again, “disgorging themselves into the streets through the suppurating wound of the sewers.” There’s nothing for it but to flee through those same noisome tunnels: “The city has digested us,” the narrator concludes, emerging alimentarily with a companion into sunlight. “I shall not light my lamp again.”
Readers may have trouble swallowing, much less digesting, the tale’s more rococo elements, but both the tone and the distinctive art play up its melodrama. (Graphic fantasy. 12-17)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-3-89955-749-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little Gestalten
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
A must-read graphic novel that is both heart-rending and beautifully hopeful.
A grandmother shares her story of survival as a Jew in France during World War II.
As part of a homework assignment, Julian (Auggie’s chief tormentor in Wonder, 2012) video chats with Grandmère, who finally relates her wartime story. Born Sara Blum to a comfortable French Jewish family, she is indulged by her parents, who remain in Vichy France after 1940. Then, in 1943, after the German occupation, soldiers come to Sara’s school to arrest her and the other Jewish students. Sara hides and is soon spirited away by “Tourteau,” a student that she and the others had teased because of his crablike, crutch-assisted walk after being stricken by polio. Nonetheless, Tourteau, whose real name is Julien, and his parents shelter Sara in their barn loft for the duration of the war, often at great peril but always with care and love. Palacio begins each part of her story with quotations: from Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry, Anne Frank, and George Santayana. Her digital drawings, inked by Czap, highlight facial close-ups that brilliantly depict emotions. The narrative thread, inspired by Palacio’s mother-in-law, is spellbinding. In the final pages, the titular bird, seen in previous illustrations, soars skyward and connects readers to today’s immigration tragedies. Extensive backmatter, including an afterword by Ruth Franklin, provides superb resources. Although the book is being marketed as middle-grade, the complexities of the Holocaust in Vichy France, the growing relationship between Sara and Julien, Julien’s fate, and the mutual mistrust among neighbors will be most readily appreciated by Wonder’s older graduates.
A must-read graphic novel that is both heart-rending and beautifully hopeful. (author’s note, glossary, suggested reading list, organizations and resources, bibliography, photographs) (Graphic historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-64553-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
“Is it possible to know something but not see what it is yet?” So writes Dean, the young narrator of this episodic graphic novel, as he records such slice-of-life episodes as playing “soldier” with a trio of new neighbors in a wooded patch near his home, losing a playground fight, meeting a mercurial homeless man and overhearing his parents worriedly discussing his bad attitude at school. Pyle designs his pages with a variety of large sequential and inset panels, using colors to signal both narrative divisions and general mood; the ordinary world is cast in a drab olive green, for instance, bursting into full, comics-style color for fantasized battles. In contrast to the simply drawn figures, which are sometimes hard to tell apart, the author tracks Dean’s groping progress—out of childhood and into something that’s not quite maturity but definitely headed that way—indirectly, with a subtlety that will engage more reflective readers. A coming-of-age tale of the more introspective sort. (Graphic fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7998-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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