Rosalie Lightning

Starred review from November 16, 2015
Hart (Hutch Owen) pulls poetry from pain in this tremendous book. Chronicling his memories of the life and death of his daughter, the eponymous Rosalie (who died at age two), Hart refuses to fall into the easy clichés of loss. The darkest depths are plumbed, from the overwhelming powerlessness of the experience to the absurdity of life going on in spite of it. Visually, Hart employs a choppily inked mixture of styles that recall the childlike simplicity of Peanuts as readily as midcentury horror work. The result captures young Rosalie’s wonder and beauty, and the hole she left behind. What catapults this graphic novel into greatness, however, is its honesty. Hart delves into details other creators might have excised—Rosalie’s favorite phrases, the odd thoughts one fixates on in the midst of catastrophe—and it is this candor that will likely leave many readers in tears. Rosalie Lightning is a masterpiece—and a luminous tribute to a brief, beautiful life. Agent: Meg Thompson, Einstein Thompson Agency

November 1, 2015
What happens to you when your child dies? "You fall," writes cartoonist and bereaved father Hart (Sequential Art/Univ. of Florida), "into a hole." Scarcely out of toddlerhood, Rosalie Lightning, her memorable name suggestive of the brevity of life, passed away to a sudden illness. Hart and his wife, Leela, a writer, had stumbled into parenthood without being quite prepared for it, as if anyone ever is. Both were living the lives of poor artists, though that was not strictly by design, since, as Hart's story reveals at some length, they were being blocked from selling a New York apartment by a building board that thought the price too low. Without calling them by name, the author writes of their passing through the stages of death--denial, anger, paralyzing grief--after Rosalie's death; if lying on the grass and staring into the middle distance won't get you through the worst patches, he suggests, there's always Roland Barthes. Hart's mood is often bitter, not just over Manhattanite greed, but also over such things as paying for his daughter's cremation with a debit card "like I'm buying a bag of bananas." The faux-naif drawings are crude and impressionistic, somewhat reminiscent of half-finished panels by Harvey Pekar or Gilbert Shelton, but the story is well-rounded and profoundly affecting. It risks being thought insensitive, given all this, to wish that it ran shorter; grief is endless, but at times, it seems that Hart's book is as well. The New Age-ier moments are the most dispensable: "Everything is a message. Everything beautiful is her." Nonetheless, anyone coping with such loss--meaning a vast readership--will find Hart's expression of pain and heartache to be entirely understandable and entirely appropriate. A bracing, deeply saddening journey into death and loss whose wryly affirmative resolution, "joy breaking through the storm clouds," is nothing but hard won.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
When his daughter dies weeks before her second birthday, Hart and his wife are desperate for explanations, looking for portents in every moment shared with Rosalie in the days leading up to her death. While searching for relief from his oppressive grief, Hart tells the story of his family: the apartment in New York they are anxious to sell; their move to Florida; Rosalie learning to bounce a ball, draw pictures, and enter preschool. Sudden and unexplained, Rosalie's death leaves them reeling. Hart's artwork reflects his despair: the past is clear and crisp, the present muddy and heavily shadowed, and the future pitch black. Hart compares himself to a character from EC Comics' series The Vault of Horror, teetering at the edge of a pit, looking down into the void with no hope of escape. As time moves on and Rosalie's parents begin to adjust to a life without her, faces become sharper and more in focusbut all it takes is something as ordinary as a phone call to pull him back to the edge of that pit. Using stories from popular culture, mythology, and folklore as metaphors for his own experiences, Hart takes an extremely personal experience of loss and grief and makes it universal. Incredibly moving, and stunningly executed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)