The field

Vignettes from the unsupervised fringes of a 1970s Ontario suburb comprise this wistful graphic memoir from Lapp (Drop-In). Over a languid summer off from elementary school, David explores the abandoned fields near his family home. Tagging along behind Edward, his slightly older next-door neighbor, David combs the grassy landscape for mice, frogs, and insects. Evading their parents' notice, the duo smuggle boxes of matches out of David's house and baby rabbits in. Nostalgia permeates many of the episodes--dandelion wishes, the sear of hot asphalt on bare feet--but the days are far from idyllic. In the company of older boys, Edward can be casually cruel, as when he drops a hammer on David and another boy from his perch on an unfinished tree fort. "You know I don't like you being around that boy," David's mother scowls. She hesitates to intervene, though, as she's preoccupied by marital strain and her own sense of isolation. Lapp's ear for dialogue and his spare, economical cartooning (reminiscent of Chester Brown, with the slightest shades of Edward Gorey) distill a persuasive kid's-eye view of the world eroding around David. Residential development razes the untended fields; his parents' marriage dissolves. Lapp's sensitive yet unsentimental portrait of fading innocence is an exceptional achievement. (May)

A child's summer of freedom a half-century ago. This graphic memoir, set in the 1970s, examines Lapp's experiences as an early adolescent over the course of a summer vacation. Largely left on his own, Dave, as he is referred to in the text, spends much of his time exploring a field on the edge of town with his friends, collecting and scrutinizing small animals and making other discoveries about the inevitability of change and the human potential for cruelty. Adults make periodic appearances, most commonly to discipline the children for misbehavior or to reveal, through glimpses of dysfunction, their nagging unhappiness and frustration. Lapp moves the narrative briskly and sometimes abruptly from one episode to another, but he steadily builds momentum as he develops themes of unexpected discovery and lurking danger. Dave's interactions with his rather reckless and aggressive friend Ed are key, and we come to understand how they prompt a reckoning, or at least the beginnings of one, with his own developing moral coordinates. The book's illustrations are particularly fitting for this material; they seem poised between a juvenile simplicity and a more mature sophistication of form, as if youthful innocence has been blended with and is now gradually yielding to an awareness of new complexities. One of the most intriguing features of the book is Lapp's representation of a time that, though not that far in the past, seems so because of the way children were allowed to roam through their communities without supervision. Beyond that historical difference, much of the material presents, with consistent sensitivity and insight, conflicts and challenges that have a timeless aura. Ultimately, Lapp succeeds in providing a memorable perspective on the wonder, cruelty, confusion, misery, and joy of a childhood spent largely independently. Revealing and moving storytelling about growing up in the 1970s. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.