This book messed me up in the best way. The art is so haunting and well done, the story gripping, sometimes quiet and melancholic, then again incredibly terrifying.

Through stunning illustrations we get to see the protagonist's idle days as he hides in the woods with his grandfather during WWII. The protagonist himself was a very unlikable character, but I still enjoyed reading this.

This is a beautiful and dark book that will hopefully find its audience, though I'm not sure to whom I'd recommend it.

Love the style of the illustrations. Haunting, dark, and of the mind while showing that there are solutions and a way out. Great!

Jerome is a French-Canadian who deserted while at home. To avoid being found, he is hiding out with his grandfather in a cabin back in the woods. While helping his grandfather refurbish the house, he runs into a mystery regarding what happened with previous owners and the deaths, disappearances, and mysterious fires that happened there. Jerome manages to learn to tun idle hands into working hands and gains an appreciation of the woods and an understanding of the house's past that he can live with. A different war story that is low-key but has creeping horror drifting through the artwork and strange poetry to infuse the tale with melancholy that ends with rays of hope.

In Idle Days, writer Thomas Desaulniers Brousseau and artist Simon Leclerc traverse the connection between personal psychological distress and the ghostly sins of the past, in a backdrop of world-shattering dread that, in many ways, mirror what too many people are probably feeling these days — or at least, believe we are on the brink of being engulfed by, a triangulated descent into madness.

World War II is raging and the world seems destined to catch fire and burn itself into oblivion, but Jerome sits at a distance, at his grandfather’s homestead in the woods in Canada, listening to radio reports of war efforts that border on propaganda. The heightened emotion of the broadcast missives both make Jerome feel like he’s missing out on something, but also create a psychological wedge between him and the outside world.

Jerome is a deserter, aided by his grandfather and mother, and charged with staying hidden for the duration of the war. But the duration is unknowable and so for Jerome it feels like he’s been condemned to an eternity. He’s been helping his grandfather renovate the old house, particularly the attic that hasn’t been touched since a fire broke out some years before, which serves as tan indicator of a tragedy that followed for the former owners.



Jerome focuses on that tragedy, a suicide that happened, as well as his own — his father’s death. These begin to manifest with intense visions that play on Jerome’s instability and are accompanied by complex realizations of the soldiers in the war that Jerome is sitting out. It’s all mixed with the landscape he currently inhabits, and this settles like a bomb in his mind.

Jerome pokes around crumbled relics and pushes Mathilde, who visits him occasionally and who he obviously is in love with, to further his investigation of the property’s dark past, perhaps as a way to avoid his own troubles, or perhaps because they accentuate the darkness of them. He wanders into town against the wishes of his mother, who’s scolding concern pierces him as if he is being stabbed by the past, causing his current wounds to feel unattended, and so they worsen.

All the burdens that weigh on Jerome, every bit of darkness that swirls around his brain, they all conspire to create a nihilism about the war that may well be sober, even strangely sensible, but also tainted by his personal darkness, and surely leading nowhere good at all.



Despite taking place in a rural area, Leclerc renders the space around Jerome in dark, brooding, claustrophobic terms, making the forest seem as constricting as the areas of the old house that Jerome and his grandfather work in. And the darkness that infects all the scenery hints at the unknown lurking out there, perhaps mere feet from where the characters stand. Something is just beyond their touch, hardly tangible and not even necessarily desired, but certainly needed. The darkness also mirrors the state of the world, which is in apocalyptic mode. As all of existence threatens to burn to a crisp, the atmosphere around Jerome becomes as overshadowed as the mood of the earth itself.

Brousseau matches this mood with his alternating story modes. At one moment, this is a stripped down family drama, but one that moves between angry, desperate dialogue and prolonged silences that elicit discomfort. Brousseau will then move into poetry that captures the more abstract aspects of the drama and its brooding, dream-like sequences, and then exposition, often in the form of secrets of the past being communicated in terms of legends.

In this way, Idle Days takes the swirl of reality that contains the personal, the local, the international, the historical, and the psychological and creates its own reality that allows us to see how each of these things knock against each other, causing jolts as we seek equilibrium.

*ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

Sadly, I can't finish this comic. While the premise is interesting the font for the words was horrible to read on my computer. I am not sure if it is because of my eyes or what but quite often letters were not fully showing up or were not there at all. Even if this had been in print form the font would have still detracted from the book. There were also places where speech bubbles crossed over the gutter and into other panels. This was a bit distracting making it hard to figure out who exactly was talking. This fact is a little nitpicky but one of the reasons why I had to stop since I was already having problems understand the text. The artwork is different, but yet I still found myself liking it. Sadly, this is another place where reading it online was a detraction. Some colors sometimes blended together or looked washed out. A fact that can easily be fixed in print form, but makes Ebooks hard to read.

This was...interesting. At times I was really enjoying this book and very invested in what was happening but the ending really threw me off. I don't know exactly what happened. And not in a good way. I just don't know what to think about this graphic novel. The artwork was interesting and arresting most of the time, though a few times it was a little bit too dark to make out what was happening. Overall this was a strange, moody historical graphic novel that had some good potential but was a bit of a letdown in the end for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me early access to this title in exchange for an honest review.

Enjoyed this graphic novel, even though graphic novels are not what I usually choose to read. Interesting subject, beautiful artwork, and just plain fun!

What I Liked

This graphic novel starts off very mysteriously. You are just dropped into a middle of a story and it takes off. You know something big is happening, but you aren't quite sure what that is, you can feel the excitement. 

Another thing I liked was the fact that this dealt with WWII in a different way than I have previously read about. While this part of the book would be classified as historical fiction it was interesting to get the point of view from someone who has fled serving in the military during such a period. It also lends to the tense feelings that fill this book from cover to cover. Not only did you follow this individual you hear updates on the progress of the war throughout the graphic novel and I though it made it very interesting  and tied this aspect of the storyline together instead of just using it as a plot point and then ignoring it completely. 

Throughout this book there are feelings of something just lingering out of the frames. Something was happening, but you couldn't figure out what was going to happen and if it would be a criminal or something not from this world. 

What I Didn’t Like

The one thing I did not like about this graphic novel was the fact that I felt like it jumped around a lot. I would be getting into a plot point and then all of a sudden it would take you somewhere completely different. Now this could be the author trying to add another layer mystery, but for me it didn't quite hit the mark. 

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed this graphic novel. I thought both the historical and spooky elements were spot on. I felt like the art work and writing aided greatly in creating a definitive atmosphere that pulls you in. You, as the reader, want to know more and figure out what is just out of your reach and outside the frame. I will add that there is some talk of suicide in this book, for me I am comfortable with this topic, but I know not everyone is. I think that if you enjoy creepy books that leave you uncomfortable, that you should look into this graphic novel. 

* I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received an e-arc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The cover art really drew me toward this book, however the unique quality of the art throughout the book quickly lost my attention as I found myself distracted trying to figure out where the plot was going at any given time. The art sets the tone and mood of the book up beautifully, however, since part of the function of the images in a graphic novel is to convey the story, the plot suffers a bit. This may just be a personal aesthetic preference more than an actual issue with the graphic aspect of the book. Overall the story did draw me in despite my issues with the art style I found the plot and characters to be haunting. Anyone interested in historical fiction or stories that follow a visually dark plot will likely enjoy this story.

I love the cover art for this book. It sets up for a dark graphic novel perfectly. It is also interesting to have a world war piece set in Canada rather than the more common European settings.

Unfortunately, that is about all that I liked about this book. The art work throughout feels lazy and muddies the clarity of the narrative to a point where it becomes difficult to maintain interest. A lot of the story is told through pictures alone, in some graphic novels this can be really powerful, but when the artwork isn't clear enough to carry a story, it just becomes a jumpy mess. What actual dialogue there is in this book is often unrealistic and frequently slows the pace of the story to a complete halt.

Overall,this feels slow, dull and never lives up to the heights set by the cover art. A real shame.

I found the fuzzy, muddy art too difficult to read. The slow pacing with nothing much happening didn't help.

I wante to like this, but it was incredibly slow paced and I found my mind wandering. I liked the art style, though.

I received a galley copy of this book from Netgalley. It is a haunting tale of a young deserter hiding out with his grandfather. His idle days are initially filled with disdain for his situation and for his cantankerous grandfather, but soon the mysteries of the past dwellers of this house catch up with him. Fact from fiction can no longer be distinguished as the book delves into the psyche of a traumatised young man and the long-lasting effects of the World War.

This book is as haunting as its story - the setting, illustrated artfully by Simon Leclerc, is mesmerising and eerie. There is an all-pervading darkness in his style that is as integral to the reading experience as Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau's words. This being a galley copy, some of the detail in the brilliant background work was lost; those picking up the final version are in for a treat.

The mixture of genres - coming-of-age, war, horror - is the way forward for most literature today. None of the otherwise distinctive markers of these genres felt out of place in this book; they meshed together beautifully. I would probably have preferred some darker incidents to take place within the story, rather than just suggestions of past sorrows. Having said that, the ending... I'm in two minds whether I liked it or not, and whether I would have preferred a less ambiguous one. Fact is, I think the preamble to that ending needed more context. Had we reached 300 pages, without a doubt Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau could easily have delved a little more into the psyche of our protagonist.

It is also refreshing to read about the far reaching affects of the World War. Setting the story in Canada, there is a relative safety that the residents face in terms of distance, yet the War is in everyone's homes through radio broadcasts announcing the see-sawing triumphs on the front.

The version I received had a few pages out of order, which was a bit strange given that the page numbering was correct. I'm sure this will be rectified by the publishing date.

While I prefer my comic art to veer more towards Roy Lichtenstein's clear lines, Leclerc's impressionist style does the atmosphere of the story apt justice. This is the kind of story that will definitely haunt you long after you have turned the last page. I foresee great things for these two creators and look forward to more of their work in the future.

The images in this book match the cover pretty well - dark (at times a bit too dark to pick up on detail), atmospheric, brooding, a bit of Southern Gothic. Readers expecting to find a slow-burn horror novel will find the slow burn but never really uncover the horror. The burn to this book is so slow, in fact, that the smoke never really clears the way to a satisfying pay-off of fire. There is a lot of promise in the artwork and storytelling, though, and I look forward to reading a follow-up book from the same author to see how his style & storytelling progress.

This may appeal to some adult readers, but would be a hard sell for YA.

I found Idle Days an interesting exploration of a time and place with which I'm unfamiliar - World War II era Canada. I love a good paranormal mystery, but had a hard time getting into this graphic novel. It moves extremely slowly, and the art isn't engaging enough on its own to make a draggy start worth moving slowly. The main character is also rather unlikeable - I'm not one to have to like or sympathise with a main character, but he didn't seem to have any redeeming or interesting qualities.

A little bit of a confusing read, especially since you don't always know what's really happening and really only get it bit by bit. Looking forward to see more from this author.

Promising story on a not so well known period : how Québécois people back home lived during WW2, through the eyes of a deserter and his family. Add it some supernatural elements, and you shoud have a great comics. Unfortunatly the drawing is confusing and the storytelling so slow, it's finally boring.

While the artwork was good, the story line wasn't my cup of tea. I would see how other readers would like it, but it was a little too dark for my preferences.