Idle Days

June 18, 2018
This spooky graphic novel set during the WWII riffs on the old saying about idle hands. Hiding from the war and his father’s death, gloomy young Canadian Jerome has gone AWOL from the army. Fearful of Jerome being spotted in their small, nosy town, his mother ships him to his gruff grandfather’s cabin in the woods. The house has a morbid history pocked with fire and suicide. Jerome’s emotional state spirals out in the seemingly haunted woods, and he’s paralyzed by nightmares of the battlefield. Jerome listens to radio reports of the slaughter in Europe, and the odd black cat crosses his path. Once the ghostly scenario is established, Desaulniers-Brousseau doesn’t do much more plot-wise than nudge it forward with minor revelations and higher-pitched spookiness. Leclerc’s assured, lustrous, and woodsy fall-tinted illustrations make every page feel like a story about to be told around a campfire at dusk. For readers fond of creepy literary tales, this is an unsettling, if occasionally formulaic, debut.

September 15, 2018
Desaulniers-Brousseau's distinctive debut centers upon Jerome, who has fled to the countryside to evade the Canadian military draft in the waning days of WWII. Still processing his dad's violent death, Jerome spends his days with his stoic grandfather, rehabbing an old house that has a history of violence, poisoning, and, as some rumors have it, witchcraft. But don't shelve this under horror just yet; the author prioritizes quiet, everyday moments, with the outr� material relegated to rare, but shocking, moments of hellish imagery, almost none of which needs to be read as happening anywhere but inside Jerome's head. What gives this nuanced story its sinister tone are Leclerc's astonishing artwork, featuring loose-lined faces slathered in murky shades of red that look like firelight, or rust, or blood. Everything?silent sequences of walks in the woods, expository monologues, rare instances of action?is thereby transformed into uncomfortable, ghoulish frights. There is ghost story fluttering at the margins here, but, like its title, this book is chiefly about long, uneventful days and the melancholic ache to give them purpose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)