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tlindhorst's review
5.0
Heartbreaking remembrance of a sweet little girl who died suddenly around 2years old. This is dad's review of what happened.
helpfulsnowman's review
This memoir of suddenly losing a kid is hard to rate. It doesn’t feel good to give it stars or not stars because it’s hard to escape the idea that the experience and the expression are intertwined.
So I’ll just talk about it a little.
The book wasn’t the best read. It’s a little disjointed and feels a little like a list of things the characters did.
Which completely makes sense and is a good expression of what’s so weird and hard and sad about something like this. When you go through something awful, you notice how weird it is that you do stuff like laundry, and how weird it is that you still have to do laundry even though you’re going through this thing.
It feels like the relentlessness of life should stop at least for a little bit, but it doesn’t.
So this book feels like an honest and accurate depiction of that, how chaotic and weird it is to grieve and still be a person who lives in real life.
And in that way, it’s a success.
But I think for me, the reading of it was probably not the equal of the creation of it. I think the reader experience is that of someone watching this guy go through some shit, and you’re sort of repulsed and scared by how deep the grief goes and by how helpless you are to do anything.
What it ends up feeling like, as a reader, is you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of some heavy shit. And he’s helping you shovel snow in your driveway, and while you’re present for him, you’re also noticing that his shoveling ain’t so hot in this moment. Of course you’re not going to say anything, but if you look at it objectively, just as shoveling, you’re not thrilled with the job.
So I’ll just talk about it a little.
The book wasn’t the best read. It’s a little disjointed and feels a little like a list of things the characters did.
Which completely makes sense and is a good expression of what’s so weird and hard and sad about something like this. When you go through something awful, you notice how weird it is that you do stuff like laundry, and how weird it is that you still have to do laundry even though you’re going through this thing.
It feels like the relentlessness of life should stop at least for a little bit, but it doesn’t.
So this book feels like an honest and accurate depiction of that, how chaotic and weird it is to grieve and still be a person who lives in real life.
And in that way, it’s a success.
But I think for me, the reading of it was probably not the equal of the creation of it. I think the reader experience is that of someone watching this guy go through some shit, and you’re sort of repulsed and scared by how deep the grief goes and by how helpless you are to do anything.
What it ends up feeling like, as a reader, is you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of some heavy shit. And he’s helping you shovel snow in your driveway, and while you’re present for him, you’re also noticing that his shoveling ain’t so hot in this moment. Of course you’re not going to say anything, but if you look at it objectively, just as shoveling, you’re not thrilled with the job.
schausette's review
4.0
Rosalie est une petite fille comme les autres. Rosalie a presque deux ans, elle aime Totoro et Ponyo sur la falaise, la peinture à l'eau, la lune et faire du vélo assise sur le siège arrière de son papa. Rosalie rigole souvent, prononce approximativement la plupart des mots et ramasse des glands par terre. Et puis un jour de novembre, Rosalie meurt. Subitement, dans son sommeil. Un peu avant ses deux ans.
"Comment vit-on quand on perd un enfant ?" se demande Tom Hart à travers ce livre. Car Rosalie, c'était sa fille, sa "puce", son "lapin" comme il l'appelait tout le temps. Rosalie Lightning est un très beau récit autobiographique écrit et dessiné par un papa - à juste titre - effondré et perdu. Avec sa femme, ils décident de partir un temps loin de la maison où Rosalie les attend à chaque recoin. Ils font des rencontres, se posent chez des amis, errent sans but réel, ramassent des glands, dessinent, écrivent, pleurent beaucoup, se reposent peu. Ils cherchent des réponses, sondent les vies de connaissances elles aussi endeuillées par la perte d'un enfant pour tenter de comprendre : comment faire son deuil ? Quand vient l'acceptation ? Arrive-elle seulement un jour ?
Rosalie Lightning est un livre qui prend aux tripes et qui ne laisse pas indifférent. Impossible de ne pas compatir, et difficile de ne pas lâcher de larmes face à la tristesse de ces parents pour qui plus rien n'a d'importance. C'est un livre dur, un vrai crève-coeur, une lecture à escalader pour arriver au bout. C'est une petite tornade émotionnelle qui donne envie de crier face à l'injustice de la situation, et que je vous recommande fortement, parce que c'est touchant et surtout parce que c'est terriblement humain.
"Comment vit-on quand on perd un enfant ?" se demande Tom Hart à travers ce livre. Car Rosalie, c'était sa fille, sa "puce", son "lapin" comme il l'appelait tout le temps. Rosalie Lightning est un très beau récit autobiographique écrit et dessiné par un papa - à juste titre - effondré et perdu. Avec sa femme, ils décident de partir un temps loin de la maison où Rosalie les attend à chaque recoin. Ils font des rencontres, se posent chez des amis, errent sans but réel, ramassent des glands, dessinent, écrivent, pleurent beaucoup, se reposent peu. Ils cherchent des réponses, sondent les vies de connaissances elles aussi endeuillées par la perte d'un enfant pour tenter de comprendre : comment faire son deuil ? Quand vient l'acceptation ? Arrive-elle seulement un jour ?
Rosalie Lightning est un livre qui prend aux tripes et qui ne laisse pas indifférent. Impossible de ne pas compatir, et difficile de ne pas lâcher de larmes face à la tristesse de ces parents pour qui plus rien n'a d'importance. C'est un livre dur, un vrai crève-coeur, une lecture à escalader pour arriver au bout. C'est une petite tornade émotionnelle qui donne envie de crier face à l'injustice de la situation, et que je vous recommande fortement, parce que c'est touchant et surtout parce que c'est terriblement humain.
tx2its's review
4.0
Reading 2023
Book 217: Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir by Tom Hart
A graphic memoir selection for #nonfictionnovember.
Synopsis: Rosalie Lightning is Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart's #1 New York Times bestselling touching and beautiful graphic memoir about the untimely death of his young daughter, Rosalie. His heart-breaking and emotional illustrations strike readers to the core, and take them along his family's journey through loss. Hart uses the graphic form to articulate his and his wife's on-going search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie's death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth, and eventually finding hope again. A Goodreads nominee for best graphic novel 2016.
Review: Well, this was a hard read. Losing a child has to be on the top of the list of most awful things that can happen to a family. This book is done so well, the raw pain and road to living again is on display for the readers. My rating 4⭐️.
Book 217: Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir by Tom Hart
A graphic memoir selection for #nonfictionnovember.
Synopsis: Rosalie Lightning is Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart's #1 New York Times bestselling touching and beautiful graphic memoir about the untimely death of his young daughter, Rosalie. His heart-breaking and emotional illustrations strike readers to the core, and take them along his family's journey through loss. Hart uses the graphic form to articulate his and his wife's on-going search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie's death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth, and eventually finding hope again. A Goodreads nominee for best graphic novel 2016.
Review: Well, this was a hard read. Losing a child has to be on the top of the list of most awful things that can happen to a family. This book is done so well, the raw pain and road to living again is on display for the readers. My rating 4⭐️.
jonwesleyhuff's review
4.0
There's no way to do a proper review-y review of this book. At least for me. But I will say, I admire the artistry and courage and openness on display here. It left me incredibly moved.
blackbird27's review
5.0
I expected to be emotionally destroyed by this book, but I did not expect to be so impressed by its formal qualities that halfway through I almost forgot to wallow in second-hand grief and instead luxuriated in the beautiful simplicity and technical accomplishment of the visual choices. Tom Hart's always been a cartoonist's cartoonist, a Zen trickster who can wring a surprising amount of meaning out of rhythm and scribble (only they're not really two different things, they're scribble-in-rhythm, the foundational element on which all the rest of the comics medium has been built). But the degree to which his graphic vocabulary has become infinitely more sophisticated, even as he sticks to the simplified grammar of old-school minicomics, caught me unprepared.
The book is a memoir of a relatively short period in his and his wife's (cartoonist Leela Corman) life: the months leading up to, and the year following, the death of their two-year-old daughter in 2011. It's also, necessarily, a sort of catalog of the art -- music, film, literature, painting, and naturally comics -- that they encounter, or turn to, in the process of remembering and grieving. If that doesn't sound like something you want to read, I guess I can understand that, but what could easily be either numbingly maudlin or gracelessly self-involved in the hands of other, even other very great, cartoonists, is handled with such exceptional deftness, honesty, and patience by Hart that it feels much more like a complete work of art than like the visually-uninspired self-conscious slog that comics memoir has come to mean in the last decade or so.
To some degree this can perhaps be attributed to the Asian influences in Hart's philosophy and, more importantly, craft. I don't think I've seen a more successful synthesis of US and Japanese approaches to comics, ever, and I couldn't quite shake the feeling, which began growing on me about halfway through, that it represents a turning-point in the medium itself. The choppy, ragged line used for most of the book is descended from Gary Panter (it's a change from the more cuddly-crude style Hart became known for some fifteen years ago, used in this book to depict the past, cartoons, dreams, and a recurrent metaphor), and his narrating rhythms are the standard indie-autobio Pekar-via-Schulz rhythms that Chester Brown popularized in the 80s, but the contemplative, unhurried panel layouts, the use of abstraction to represent emotion, and the lush grayscale tones giving the images weight and body are all pure manga.
I very much doubt I'm going to read a better comic this year; I almost certainly won't read a more emotionally affecting one. Because of course I was, as expected, emotionally destroyed by this book. I was also, most unexpectedly, and indefinably, healed by it.
The book is a memoir of a relatively short period in his and his wife's (cartoonist Leela Corman) life: the months leading up to, and the year following, the death of their two-year-old daughter in 2011. It's also, necessarily, a sort of catalog of the art -- music, film, literature, painting, and naturally comics -- that they encounter, or turn to, in the process of remembering and grieving. If that doesn't sound like something you want to read, I guess I can understand that, but what could easily be either numbingly maudlin or gracelessly self-involved in the hands of other, even other very great, cartoonists, is handled with such exceptional deftness, honesty, and patience by Hart that it feels much more like a complete work of art than like the visually-uninspired self-conscious slog that comics memoir has come to mean in the last decade or so.
To some degree this can perhaps be attributed to the Asian influences in Hart's philosophy and, more importantly, craft. I don't think I've seen a more successful synthesis of US and Japanese approaches to comics, ever, and I couldn't quite shake the feeling, which began growing on me about halfway through, that it represents a turning-point in the medium itself. The choppy, ragged line used for most of the book is descended from Gary Panter (it's a change from the more cuddly-crude style Hart became known for some fifteen years ago, used in this book to depict the past, cartoons, dreams, and a recurrent metaphor), and his narrating rhythms are the standard indie-autobio Pekar-via-Schulz rhythms that Chester Brown popularized in the 80s, but the contemplative, unhurried panel layouts, the use of abstraction to represent emotion, and the lush grayscale tones giving the images weight and body are all pure manga.
I very much doubt I'm going to read a better comic this year; I almost certainly won't read a more emotionally affecting one. Because of course I was, as expected, emotionally destroyed by this book. I was also, most unexpectedly, and indefinably, healed by it.