Harvey and his brother come home from playing after school to find that their father has died of a heart attack. They go to the funeral.

That's it.

And then, on the last page, Harvey turns invisible.

What? Is this a kids' book? Too depressing, too obscure.

I picked it up to read as I was weeding our children's graphic novels collection; this one's not going to make the cut. ( )

A beautiful and heartbreaking book about loss during childhood.

I feel really emotional about this book.

My edition is a beautiful little hardback with beautiful endpapers.

I loved reading this book because it has so much atmosphere and depth. The author and illustrator are both from Quebec and it has a distinct Quebecois feel. Slang words, the way the artist draws the streets, it's all there and it's great.

The art in this book -- I asked my wife (who's an artist) about it and she said that it's most likely a print-making process, that many of the images would take a long time to perfect because of the way the materials work. So the fact that the artist probably had to do each page of the book more than once to get the desired result? That just gave me so much more respect for this book overall.

I loved the muted colour palette and the foggy, soft, spidery images. I love the way the artist has implied form and drawn ghostly cars to hint at the traffic.

The writing? Beautiful. It was really sad and it felt a little sparse, but I think children's books sometimes do just because they're a children's book, for me anyway. I really liked Harvey's character and I liked all the detail the author put into the protagonist.

I will say I felt the ending was a little abrupt for me, but that's a creative choice and it's purely just my opinion.

4 stars from me, a lovely little piece of Canlit. ( )

Poignant story about a young boy retreating into an inner world following the death of his father. Love the references to The Incredible Shrinking Man. ( )

I went into this book expecting a typical graphic novel with a clear-cut story. My first reading was a disappointment, because it's not a standard graphic novel. After the book sat with me for a while, I realized that the story is more akin to a poem than a story. The structure is loose and the events are related more through their emotional arc than through linear sequence. The content is brilliantly told from a child's perspective, and it reads like how a child might recount the day their father died. The big event of the day was a toothpick boat race. The death was a bewildering event that had its devastating impact not on the day it happened, but several days later. In the end it seems like Harvey deals with the sudden and overwhelming sense of loss by relating to and emulating his childhood "hero", which is not necessarily a happy ending, and which like day-to-day life, is not entirety conclusive. ( )