*Starred Review* Ten-year-old Lester, orphaned by his mother's cancer, lives with his bachelor uncle Ken on a southwestern Ontario farm. He wears a superhero's mask and cape all day, and he imagines that he has been entrusted with the task of staving off invading space aliens. Ken is making allowances for the boy, but he's clearly uncomfortable with Lester's preference for solitary play and comic books. It's Jimmy, who runs the nearby gas station-convenience store, who reaches out to Lester, participates in his alien-invasion fantasy, and brings him back to the world. Lemire enriches this rather familiar scenario with telling, particularizing detail, ensuring that this time the old heartwarming routine is unforgettably special. Books like this are the reason alternative-comics publishers such as Top Shelf exist. Lemire uses an utterly personal, idiosyncratic drawing style, rough but completely clear, that even just-off-mainstream publishers, such as Dark Horse, would insist on gussying up for publication (in fact, though, Lemire's art resembles the jagged, blocky look of Mike Mignola's--and Dark Horse's--
Hellboy). The simple story's slice-of-life lyricism, sparked by magic realism, is too art-house-movie-ish for the mainstream. But it works.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Gr 10 Up-- After losing his mother to cancer, 10-year-old Lester moves in with his Uncle Ken, a gruff and solitary bachelor who owns a small farm in rural Ontario. Ken tries his best to reach out to his nephew but can't relate to this boy who wears a superhero cape and prefers reading comics to watching hockey on television. Lester spends most of his time by himself until he makes a friend with the least likely of characters: Jimmy, a disgraced pro hockey player who now runs the convenience store at the local gas station. Jimmy enters Lester's imaginary world by helping him build a fort to stave off an alien invasion and encouraging him to write and draw his own comic book. The bond that grows between the two helps both Lester and Jimmy move beyond the tragedies life gave them. Lemire's writing nails that complicated mixture of anger and sadness that comes with losing a loved one. His black-and-white illustrations work equally well, using rough and chunky lines to powerfully re-create the solitary nature of farm life and Lester's vivid imagination. Teens will love the humor in Lester's odd imagination and will be touched by the heart of a book that delivers a compelling look at tragedy and how to move on after it strikes. --School Library Journal
Stop me if you've heard this one: a young boy on a farm discovers he can fly. That the boy is only daydreaming is where Jeff Lemire's Tales from the Farm departs from more familiar comics territory and instead charts its own terrain of family, fantasies, and the realities of growing up in rural Canada.
The hero of this black-and-white graphic novel is Lester, a 10-year-old boy growing up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. Ever since his mom died, Lester has been left in the care of his Uncle Ken, a kindhearted man who is unequipped to deal with his new household charge. Lester has also been wearing a mask and cape as he disappears into the dream worlds of his comic books.
Their lives are transformed after Lester meets a different sort of hero, a former hockey star named Jimmy Lebeuf, now a local gas-station attendant thanks to a head injury received in his first (and only) pro game. Their unlikely friendship forms the heart of Lemire's story, one that mixes visions of rural life with alien invasions and pond hockey.
Lemire captures the beauty of the rural landscape in his stark compositions. There's good pacing too, matching the rhythm of the seasons, with whole pages devoted to pauses between scenes. Lemire has a knack for creating memorable characters through both look and dialogue, such as the hoser-mouthed, pug-nosed mug of Lebeuf. A lot of this comes from the drawing style, full of highly distinctive and emotive lines that go from chunky wedges to scratches. For the most part this works, although in some panels more care should have been taken, as the messiness takes away from the effect.
But overall, these tremulous lines pull you into the fragile world of childhood. The end result is a deceptively simple but tightly focused story about imagination and the yearning to be whole. --Quill & Quire
In this heartfelt and beautifully sparse tale of an orphaned ten-year-old named Lester, Jeff Lemire uses an illustration style that perfectly captures the wide open spaces of rural Ontario. After Lester's mother dies, he's sent to live on his uncle's farm. He hardly knows his uncle and his father has long since left the scene. Lester forms a friendship with a gas station attendant named Jimmy Lebeuf who used to be a professional hockey player until a bad hit knocked him out of the game. Together, the two comics fans build a rich fantasy life revolving around the possibility of an alien invasion. In a watermark grayscale, Lemire also provides flashbacks to both Lebeuf's career and the details surrounding the death of Lester's mother. Another section, showing pages from Lester's own home-made comic book, is imaginative and funny.
The book has four parts, corresponding to the four seasons, and beginning with winter. If there wasn't a word spoken in this understated and genuinely moving tale, readers would still appreciate the strength and off-hand precision of Lemire's landscapes. From fields to farm equipment to the simple shapes of a gas station, Lemire manages to find the essence of each object and somehow give it an emphasis that makes you see it with fresh eyes. Tales From the Farm often has the same effect as the best black-and-white photography: making you focus in on what matters. --Jeff Vandermeer, Bookslut
