Mother, come home /

The "introduction by Thomas Tennant" is actually the entire graphic story. A balding man drifts over landscape and ocean, his mind searching for someone through confused memories and intentions. Strange sea creatures pull him under. Scene change: young Thomas visits his mother's recent grave, wearing the lion mask she had given him. The balding father stands next to him. Mother is dead, and now father and son are lost. Thomas retreats into fantasy where he wears the mask as self-appointed groundskeeper of his mother's garden, room, hiding place-actually, the grave. Father cares for the child and feigns normality. But father's mind refuses to accept the loss yet pursues it while losing touch with everything else. In the end, father and son are released from their grief, but only Thomas survives. Verdict Hornschemeier uses simple line art and varied color palettes for conveying emotional and narrative detail, capturing graphically with a sort of exquisite beauty the symbolic fantasies of Thomas and the grief-induced psychosis of his father. For adults and mature YAs.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.