Essex County

Locations
Call Number: Adult Graphic Novel / Lemire, Jeff
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Adult Graphic Novel / Lemire, Jeff	4-week checkout	On Shelf

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Dark slice of small town life submitted by klickitat on August 16, 2012, 8:19am Morose Canadian story. Great art. Was a 2011 Canada Reads selection.

Bleak and pensive and wonderful. submitted by eknapp on September 25, 2013, 9:04am Part 1: Tales from the Farm. A lonely ten-year-old orphan lives on a farm with his lonely bachelor uncle, who has no idea how to relate to his charge. He dreams of being a superhero and never removes his mask and cape. He's befriended by the slow guy who runs the county gas station and together they fight off imaginary aliens.

Part 2: Ghost Stories. A senile, deaf, lonely old man muses on his past while drifting in and out of dementia (the transitions between past-present and confusion-lucidity are brilliant; it's an absolutely believable portrayal of what might be behind the disjointed ramblings of an elderly man with dementia). Once a hockey star with NHL potential, he lost his family, his future, and his happiness to a knee injury and an indiscretion with his brother's wife. A portrait of a life wasted.

Part 3: The Country Nurse. A lonely nurse meddles in the lives of her patients and their family members, including the old man from Ghost Stories and the boy from Tales from the Farm. The relationships between characters from all three stories are highlighted.

Jeff Lemire has a grubby but effective black-and-white illustration style that is easy to get lost in. It's a stolid book, thoughtful and poignant and sad and bleak and powerful. There are a very few happy moments, all the more potent for being so rare.

Good, not great submitted by EJZ on June 24, 2018, 10:01am A good graphic novel, but certainly not a great one. The art is typical Lemire, but not in the complex, beautiful, homey way that captures you in Sweet Tooth. The story is deceptively interconnected between the characters, but I don't think Lemire fully accomplished the feeling of the hopelessness of fate that he seemed to be driving towards. An interesting read, but in the end all the characters were quite one-dimensional and flat, and easy to forget about.