Review by Booklist Review
Ware is well known for his expansive, introspective, depth-plumbing works of graphic fiction, and his latest, featuring a series of interconnected, decade-spanning narratives spiraling outward from an Omaha school, is no different. The three stories included here (the first in a projected two-volume set) vary subtly in visual style: The first, of frustrated, unfulfilled Mr. Brown, who's fixated on a brief glimmer of creative success, is told in tidy blocks that flit between his early career, his present, and the sf short story he wrote in the bitter wake of a heartbreak. The second, focused on the life of privileged, cruel Jason Lint, is looser, with jarring words and images overlapping and looping back to reveal a troubled childhood, an all-too-brief period of growth, and an almost inevitable decline into heartlessness and isolation. The final story has a more straightforward style, but the narrative is the most resonant: Joanne Cole, the only Black teacher at the school, loves teaching third grade and playing the banjo, but as Ware delves deeper into her background, he reveals heartbreaking truths. In his precise lines and shapes, Ware makes masterful work of both the architecturally exact spaces and the hunched shoulders, furrowed brows, and quivering chins of his deeply expressive characters. There are only brief moments of warmth and affection, but the wider picture, depicting a complex matrix of aching loneliness; long-simmering, acidic resentment; and a desperation for human connection and fulfillment, is rich with pathos and powerfully stirring.--Sarah Hunter Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ware (Building Stories) delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time as it charts the intersecting lives of characters that revolve around an Omaha, Neb., parochial school in the 1970s. Third-grader Chalky White and his high schooler sister, Alice, are new students. Chalky finds his outcast status concretized when he tries to make friends with the bullied Rusty Brown and gets embroiled in recess humiliation. Alice attracts both friendly attention and leers, including from stoner Jordan Lint and (secretly) from her English teacher, Woody Brown (Rusty's father), and her art teacher, Chris Ware. The narrative then shifts to Woody, dropping into the world of a sci-fi story he publishes in a pulp magazine, about an astronaut who becomes unhinged on Mars, before revealing Woody's own youthful heartbreak. Next, the birth-to-death trajectory of toxic Jordan is intimately portrayed, including profound childhood loss, youthful rebellions, brief redemption, and restless middle age. Finally, Ware focuses on teacher Joanne Cole, a black woman who grows up in poverty, then stoically perseveres as an educator despite racism at the wealthy, predominantly white academy--and loves to play the banjo. Ware's dazzling geometric art--pointillism for Woody's eyesight sans glasses; close-ups of Joanne's face through the decades--has never been better. Through this winding narrative, resonant echoes are drawn between characters inside their loneliness, adversity, and frustrations (such as two different characters, decades apart, placing a flower in a bowl of water). Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Ware (Monograph) presents the first half of his magnum opus exploring the profoundly entangled lives of a group of characters all attending or employed by a Midwestern parochial school in the 1970s. On his first day of third grade in his new school, Chalky White attempts to bond with bullied outcast Rusty Brown, who is more anxious about being separated from a prized action figure than he is interested in making friends. Meanwhile, Chalky's sister, Alice, charms her new classmates, includinfg toxic jerk Jordan Lint, as well as her English teacher, Woody, who happens to be Rusty's father. After a digression into the romantic disappointment and abandoned dreams in Woody's background, the focus shifts to a remarkable sequence tracking Jordan's entire life, from the moment of his birth until his death as a lonesome old man, before concluding with a fractured narrative highlighting the solitary life of Chalky and Rusty's teacher, Ms. Cole. VERDICT Masterfully illustrated, brilliantly designed, and bursting with compassion for characters united by time and space who nonetheless feel isolated owing to fear and shame, this is without a doubt one of the most exciting releases of the year. [an editor's pick, see "Fall Fireworks," p. 23.]
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ware (Building Stories, 2012, etc.) fans rejoice: The long-rumored and hinted-at adventures of Rusty Brown finally come to the page after years in the making.If Ware's Jimmy Corrigan is indeed the smartest kid in the world, Rusty Brown is perhaps among the least comfortable inside his own skin: He lives a life of quiet desperation in a snowy Midwestern suburb, obsessed with comic heroes such as Supergirl, who he's sure would melt away the snow with her heat vision ("maybe she has problems shutting it off sometimes"); for his part, he wonders whether, in the quiet after a snowfall, he might have developed superhearing. Rusty's dad, Woody, is no more content: A sci-fi escapist, he teaches English alongside an art teacher who just happens to be named Mr. Ware but seems happy only when he's smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee in the teachers' lounge even if Mr. Ware is given to bewildering him there with talk of Lacan, Baudrillard, and ennui. Joanne Cole, an African American third grade language teacher, gently empathizes with her angst-y little charges while nursing an impulse to learn how to play the banjo; it being the civil rights era, the music store owner who sells her an instrument asks, without malice, "So how'd you get interested in the banjo, anyway? Folk music? Protest' songs?" The lives of all these characters and others intersect in curious and compelling ways. As with Ware's other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice. Joanne's story is perhaps the best developed, but the picked-on if aspirational Rusty ("I appear as a mortal, butI may not be"), the dweeby Woody, the beleaguered Chalky, and other players are seldom far from view.An overstuffed, beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
