CURRENT: Harvey by Herve Bouchard

Despite my proclivity for movie viewing lately (seriously, it's becoming a problem. I have about 10 movies from the library at home... including the oddly addicting second season of True Blood) I'm slowly getting back to books. We can thank School Library Journal once again for sending me a graphic novel to review. It's definitely something that's completely out of my normal element. Harvey, by Herve Bouchard and illustrated by Janice Nadeau, will hit bookstores on the first of October. In France and Canada, the book is already out. The catch is you have to read it in French. In fact, it's actually won one of the many literary awards I've never heard of. In this case, it's the Canada Council for the Arts Governor General's Literary Award. Pictured here is the French/Canadian, and not the upcoming American, cover of the book.

I'm about halfway through the title. I suspect it might win some American literary awards as well. The book is obviously for children, focusing on a young child and written with a kind of childlike innocence. The book is also pretty dark, using muted colors and, for lack of a better description, "ugly" art. I'm not usually a fan of unpretty pictures in graphic novels. Harvey is one of the rare exceptions. For this title, it works. It helps sets the mood that ultimately, this is not going to be a happy book about happy things. I'm already planning on handing it off to a few other librarians to see what they think about it, especially when it comes to deciding which age groups it's the most appropriate for.

For those of you who follow me on Goodreads and LibraryThing, you probably noticed that I splurged a little and brought a new graphic novel recently. There should be a review and musings about Spider-Man: The Birth of Venom sometime in August. After going through the early sections of the tome, it's a lot more about Spidey getting used to his new costume than it is about Venom. I guess arguably the costume is Venom, but the story really starts for me when Eddie Brock gets his new threads and starts talking about himself in the plural form.

So... what's on your summer reading list?