From Publishers Weekly
It's 1959 and Truman Capote is looking for a challenging project. A story about an unsolved crime in Kansas sends him and assistant Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) on a transforming journey. This graphic novel gives a fictionalized account of Capote's time in Kansas researching the Clutter family murders for his groundbreaking In Cold Blood. Once at the crime scene, the flamboyant Capote must learn to fit in with the locals and find a way to get inside the crime. Writer Parks's last book, Union Station, was another true crime tale, and he has done his research for this, but he also introduces several unreal elements, including the ghost of 16-year-old murder victim Nancy Clutter, who becomes a confidante for Capote as the tale goes on. The book attempts to deal with the writer's ambivalence over his involvement in the aftermath of the crime, but the sometimes flat script isn't done any favors by the art, which has a good sense of place but a poor grasp of likenesses, making the characters often difficult to identify. Capote was a complicated, colorful figure, but this book only scratches the surface of the demons that drove him. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up–Cleverly reprising the genre blur that Truman Capote created when he wrote In Cold Blood as a nonfiction novel, Parks and Samnee present and represent the author's fact-gathering trip to the Midwest in the early 1960s, traveling with his soon-to-become-famous friend Harper Lee. There he dealt with locals who found his New York City flair and personal foppishness either silly or offensive, interviewed the Clutter family's murderers, and struggled with memories of his own awkward childhood. Samnee's black-and-white art captures both the internal and external lights and shadows of small-town America–its diner, prison cells, neighborhhoods–and Capote's own psychology–his admiration and jealousy of Lee, his memories of boyhood, his loneliness far from his adult home. In keeping with the more-than-fact angle of this graphic novel, a sweet girl ghost floats through these pages as well, a reminder of the humanity behind the story that increased its author's stature in the world of letters.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
