Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When his daughter dies weeks before her second birthday, Hart and his wife are desperate for explanations, looking for portents in every moment shared with Rosalie in the days leading up to her death. While searching for relief from his oppressive grief, Hart tells the story of his family: the apartment in New York they are anxious to sell; their move to Florida; Rosalie learning to bounce a ball, draw pictures, and enter preschool. Sudden and unexplained, Rosalie's death leaves them reeling. Hart's artwork reflects his despair: the past is clear and crisp, the present muddy and heavily shadowed, and the future pitch black. Hart compares himself to a character from EC Comics' series The Vault of Horror, teetering at the edge of a pit, looking down into the void with no hope of escape. As time moves on and Rosalie's parents begin to adjust to a life without her, faces become sharper and more in focus but all it takes is something as ordinary as a phone call to pull him back to the edge of that pit. Using stories from popular culture, mythology, and folklore as metaphors for his own experiences, Hart takes an extremely personal experience of loss and grief and makes it universal. Incredibly moving, and stunningly executed.--Volin, Eva Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hart (Hutch Owen) pulls poetry from pain in this tremendous book. Chronicling his memories of the life and death of his daughter, the eponymous Rosalie (who died at age two), Hart refuses to fall into the easy clichés of loss. The darkest depths are plumbed, from the overwhelming powerlessness of the experience to the absurdity of life going on in spite of it. Visually, Hart employs a choppily inked mixture of styles that recall the childlike simplicity of Peanuts as readily as midcentury horror work. The result captures young Rosalie's wonder and beauty, and the hole she left behind. What catapults this graphic novel into greatness, however, is its honesty. Hart delves into details other creators might have excised-Rosalie's favorite phrases, the odd thoughts one fixates on in the midst of catastrophe-and it is this candor that will likely leave many readers in tears. Rosalie Lightning is a masterpiece-and a luminous tribute to a brief, beautiful life. Agent: Meg Thompson, Einstein Thompson Agency (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The death of a child is one of the heaviest subjects imaginable, and to capture that devastation in a very cartoony style, as Hart (Daddy Lightning) does here, is no small feat. This beautiful and gut-wrenching book chronicles the sudden, unexplained death of Hart's 23-month-old daughter and the beginning of the lifelong process of grieving that loss. Hart fills the pages with flashes of the mundane and transcendent experience of parenting a toddler, centering on the incredulous discovery of Rosalie's lifeless body in her crib and drifting through the subsequent months of hazy despair. His pacing is what makes this book so extremely effective. By mixing up his time line and interspersing characters and scenarios from Rosalie's and Hart's own favorite stories, the reader feels the depth of his grief. As the parent of a young child, this reviewer could relate to Hart's memories of Rosalie's precocious nature and intoxicating smile, which reappear from time to time as the book progresses. This becomes ever more painful and beautiful as the full weight of her loss is realized. Verdict When grieving, friends can help with everyday tasks and your spouse can hold you while you cry, but ultimately you alone must bear the pain of that loss to integrate it into your life. That's exactly what happens in Rosalie Lightning; a gift to every reader and to anyone who has grieved.-Emilia Packard, Austin, TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What happens to you when your child dies? "You fall," writes cartoonist and bereaved father Hart (Sequential Art/Univ. of Florida), "into a hole." Scarcely out of toddlerhood, Rosalie Lightning, her memorable name suggestive of the brevity of life, passed away to a sudden illness. Hart and his wife, Leela, a writer, had stumbled into parenthood without being quite prepared for it, as if anyone ever is. Both were living the lives of poor artists, though that was not strictly by design, since, as Hart's story reveals at some length, they were being blocked from selling a New York apartment by a building board that thought the price too low. Without calling them by name, the author writes of their passing through the stages of deathdenial, anger, paralyzing griefafter Rosalie's death; if lying on the grass and staring into the middle distance won't get you through the worst patches, he suggests, there's always Roland Barthes. Hart's mood is often bitter, not just over Manhattanite greed, but also over such things as paying for his daughter's cremation with a debit card "like I'm buying a bag of bananas." The faux-naif drawings are crude and impressionistic, somewhat reminiscent of half-finished panels by Harvey Pekar or Gilbert Shelton, but the story is well-rounded and profoundly affecting. It risks being thought insensitive, given all this, to wish that it ran shorter; grief is endless, but at times, it seems that Hart's book is as well. The New Age-ier moments are the most dispensable: "Everything is a message. Everything beautiful is her." Nonetheless, anyone coping with such lossmeaning a vast readershipwill find Hart's expression of pain and heartache to be entirely understandable and entirely appropriate. A bracing, deeply saddening journey into death and loss whose wryly affirmative resolution, "joy breaking through the storm clouds," is nothing but hard won. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
