Broken Frontier

From Hope Larson comes a tender, poignant tale of a special girl in a foreign place.

Having come to Onion City, Indiana to study art, French exchange student Noémie is on her own for the first time. Soon her loneliness eases when she meets Anna, a baker’s daughter who sculpts in bread. They quickly become friends. But someone else is interested in Noémie, as well, a mysterious boy who follows and photographs her. Noémie is intrigued by him, but she misses her home and the boy she left behind. Still, she tries to adjust and enjoy her time in America...but her dreams won’t let her. Nightly, Noémie dreams of a girl named Marcy and a talking horse traveling the countryside in search of something she’s lost. The dreams are weird, but weirder still are little ways in which they seep into Noémie’s waking life.

I didn’t think myself the reader to whom this sort of graphic novel is aimed, but within a few pages the story engaged me thoroughly, and I found myself flipping pages much more quickly as I read on to find out what happens. Now Gray Horses is the furthest thing from a thriller that one can imagine, but Hope Larson does a wonderful job of taking very real but very personal anxieties about leaving home for a foreign place and building a character around it with whom just about anyone can empathize and identify. Noémie is a wonderful mix of strength and fragility, taking bold steps in her life while also doubting them, then growing and developing while learning things about herself she never knew. Her free-spirited friend Anna is a perfect foil, but Marcy, the girl in Noémie’s dreams is the most intriguing character in Gray Horses. Who is she? Why does Noémie continually dream about her? What is each of them trying to tell the other? These questions, though they are never really answered, enliven the narrative nonetheless. It’s part of the charm of Gray Horses that the journey—both Noémie’s and the reader’s—is more important and rewarding than the destination.

Hope Larson’s artwork is simple but resonant and a treat for the eye. Pastels augment her bold lines, her figures seemingly cartoonish at first inspection, but possessing a graphic complexity when we look closely. The way she decorates the soft, curved contours of her panels with translations of the French dialogue has a natural feel and flow about it. But while her illustrations have an endearing quality, it’s the visual language she brings to Gray Horses that captivates most. It’s a sense of timing and transition that may seem well-suited for kid’s lit, but there’s more to what she’s doing than meets the eye. It’s hard to describe in words, but she has an intriguing way of playing around beats—sometimes hitting them just right, but other times hitting them a breath before or after the beat lands. This sort of strategy can easily backfire, but Larson makes it work as an aspect of narrative. In fact, the way her artwork conveys aspects of story and emotion while also keeping the reader guessing is quite remarkable.

Gray Horses is a quick read, not fun exactly, but poignant and lighthearted, just the sort of graphic novel someone not normally into comics might pick up and be pleasantly surprised by.