Sunny, Volume 1

Starred review from April 22, 2013
Eisner Award–winner Matsumoto’s (Tekkon Kinkreet) newest work is a touching but sad story of the lost souls in the Star Kids children’s home. When new kid Sei is dropped off by his parents, he believes they’ll return for him soon. But he discovers that the other kids at the home once believed they, too, would quickly return to their parents. The home is populated with problem kids like Junsuke, a kleptomaniac; Haruo, a rebellious preteen whose devil-may-care attitude hides a soft heart; Kenji, who needs his absentee alcoholic father’s permission to drop out of middle school; sensitive Megumu, who fears dying alone; and Kiko, a girl trying too hard to become a woman. The Star Kids home is a chaotic place full of broken children desperate for love. Their sole break from reality is a dilapidated old car—Sunny—in the front lawn, where they imagine taking a ride to a magical world. The predominantly black-and-white art, in a style with more realism than most manga illustration, is occasionally interrupted by beautiful full-color paintings. Matsumoto deftly weaves a sense of longing and sadness into even the most chaotic scenes, and readers are drawn into the lives of children struggling to be themselves in a world that doesn’t want them. The first in a series.

May 15, 2013
Grades 9-12 To adults, the Nissan Sunny 1200 may look like a broken-down old car in front of a Japanese home for orphans. To the children and teens of the orphanage, though, the Sunny is a clubhouse, a spaceship, a getaway vehicle, and one of the few places that is truly theirs after they are abandoned by their parents. Readers catch glimpses of each of the orphans' lives, both the imaginary adventures they devise while in the Sunny and the sometimes heartbreaking ones outside of it. Matsumoto is probably best known for his Eisner Awardwinning title, Tekkon Kinkreet (2007), about orphan street kids trying to protect their town from invading Yakuza. He returns to those themes in this latest work and combines evocative art and concise dialogue to tell the melancholy story of the kids and teens who use the Sunny to escape their problematic home lives. This title would appeal to fans of atmospheric titles such as Benjamin's Orange (2009) and Yuki Obata's We Were There (2013).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)