My Own World

I might as well start by saying that I did not completely understand this book! I am not a great fan of graphic novels anyway; so I have read very few and no doubt am ignorant of the conventions that might enable me to connect more of the dots. However, as I see it, this story begins and ends in Glen Cove, British Columbia, with a five-year hiatus in Vancouver. Nathan is a very angry little boy, nine-years-old, and hating the fact that his best friend and buddy Ben is turning into a teenager with a lot of interests that don't include his younger brother. So Nathan is feeling lost. Also, there is something really wrong within the family that no one talks about, or not to him, leaving him with the distinct impression that whatever is wrong is probably his fault. So he acts out in various ways, one of which ends up with his being pursued by the leader of a gang that is portrayed as being on the edge of criminal after he has discovered their secret hideout in the woods. In his terror, Nathan hides and escapes into a semi-dream world where he alone is in charge and can make and do anything he can imagine. His "own world" becomes his refuge from unbearable reality. These escapes sometimes seem to take up no time in the real world -- which leads to his buying vast quantities of snacks twice within half an hour, under the suspicious glare of the convenience store owner -- and a whole night when his father finally manages to find him where he has hidden in the local woods, but, after that experience, he doesn't wake up for several days! Did he hit his head? And then when he wakes, he finds he and his mother have moved in with his grandparents in Vancouver because Ben is really really sick. Hospital-sick. This is where the five-year gap occurs and Ben dies (beautifully revealed to the reader by one totally black page, followed by a picture of an empty hospital bed). On their return to Glen Cove, Nathan goes back once more to his private world where he finds Ben -- is this heaven? -- and manages to take back to reality the cat-balloon hybrid that he created back when he was nine and desperately needed a friend. With Meow to help him, Nathan finds he can fly, high over Glen Cove, the swimming pool, the woods, all the places he had shared with Ben, and it seems, this allows him to gain some perspective on, and come to some sort of peace and acceptance of, Ben's death.

Now, I may have this somewhat wrong, and I have certainly left out a great deal. Nathan's creativity as he built his world, his delight in the roller-coaster slide that he constructed, lego-like from chunks of light, his loneliness that leads him literally to make friends, but then the horror when one of them turns from a big furry cookie monster to a Godzilla-like creature that wants to destroy his world: all these things come through in the drawing. What is lacking is a coherent plot line. However, it is a story dealing with a disturbing and difficult subject, the death of a sibling, and, while it doesn't produce a solution, it does certainly suggest very strongly that trying to shield a child from the truth because that child is young and it is unpleasant and hard to talk about is a very Bad Thing!