From Publishers Weekly
The graphic novel is an excellent medium for the growing-up story, but works best when it focuses on plot rather than circumstance, on movement rather than Wordworthian spots of time. This book, full of eerie images from an impoverished and abusive '70s childhood, resembles a tone poem. It lingers in reminiscence and summary—fine for the psychoanalyst's couch and male teens quietly wallowing in self-pity, but it doesn't make a story that transcends its adolescent origins. White is a fine artist with moments of real meaning (for instance, a man in one panel, morphing to a teenager in a man's clothing, morphing into a little boy, all three with the same luggage), but he fails to put these images together into a narrative. He might produce a fine second or third book, but the audience for these jewel-like pastels and cold white images of the winter wastes of New England feels limited to men who remember, too vividly, their bad Vietnam-era childhoods. It doesn't help that much of the narrative is grim and wordy, reading like a rough therapy session. Some of the panels, especially those dealing with a suicide, are so evocative as to be transcendent, but this is largely a book of unrealized promise.
(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up–An introspective story about a man going home to visit his family and reliving his past along the way. Many of Shane's memories are painful. As he reflects on incidents in which his father repeatedly abused his family and once shot a cow in the head after it kicked him, readers may wonder why the young man would even consider returning home. Throughout the book, the quality of the artwork is consistently high, with two notable instances standing above the rest. The first is when Shane remembers trying on the Superman cape made by his mother and realized to his dismay that he could not actually fly. The stylistic change and the images of Superman himself juxtaposed against the boy's emotional outpouring are extremely effective. The second is when the family dynamic finally changed when Shane's father confessed to an affair and (literally) crumbled to pieces before his son. The cover at first seems misleading–the image of a man walking with an axe through the snow seems reminiscent of
The Shining–but after subsequent readings it makes sense as readers consider the constant threat of violence in the father/son relationship.
North Country moves from a strange beginning into a deeply textured story. It can be read again and again, and each time teens can appreciate different nuances in the writing and artwork.
–Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
