Juliette: or, the Ghosts Return in the Spring

by Camille Jourdy, Aleshia Jensen (Translator)

Overview

A vibrant tableau of small-town life as seen through the eyes of a woman returning home from Paris.

Juliette boards a train from Paris and comes back to her hometown hoping for a low-key visit with family and old friends. What she finds is anything but. Her sister, a caregiver and mother of two, is carrying on an elaborate affair with a man from a costume shop. Her parents, separated, are now estranged. Father is sure he’s developing Alzheimer’s, though it’s more likely that he’s simply getting old. Mother, on the other hand, revels in the second act of her life as a free woman, an artist with a show at their local gallery to prove it. Slowly, Juliette finds herself entangled with the unlikely Georges, a dyspeptic alcoholic who is stuck in his life. These divergent paths inevitably cross against a gloriously painted backdrop of eccentric small-town living.

Camille Jourdy’s beautiful watercolor pages provide an unfeigned mileu for the subtle dramedy at hand in Juliette. All too real human emotions, bittersweet and relatable in their rawness, come together to form a poetic realism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770466647
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Pages:	236
Sales rank:	1,042,466
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Camille Jourdy grew up in Dole, near the Jura Mountains in France. She studied at the Beaux-Arts d’Epinal in Lorraine before heading for the École des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. She has authored and illustrated a number of award-winning graphic novels such as Rosalie Blum (Angoulême Prix Révélation, Prix RTL) and Les Vermeilles (Angoulême Fauve Jeunesse). She has worked with toy company Moulin Roty since 2012.

Editorial Reviews

06/26/2023

Set in a French suburb, this contemplative, quietly witty graphic novel from Jourdy (The Wondrous Wonders) follows three disparately lonely characters: anxious Juliette, who visits her hometown from Paris in search of “peace and quiet”; her busy married sister Marylou, who is hiding an affair with a costume-shop worker; and Georges, who greets an imaginary wife when he comes home from the bar to his slovenly house, which happens to be the one the sisters grew up in. Their narratives braid together at a leisurely pace, granting space for the artwork to illuminate such telling details as a row of trinkets from Juliette’s childhood. Familial pressure and intimacy build in tandem, as Juliette unearths a family secret, while Marylou dreams of a life with fewer burdens. Her lover arrives for their greenhouse trysts dressed as a bear or ghost, and wants to make their casual relationship more serious. Meanwhile, Georges and Juliette toe the line between a friendship and romance, but the hazards of being tender in a harsh world are driven home by the sudden death of the baby duck they were raising. The cartoon panels are punctuated by lush, more realistic watercolors exploding in a spring palette of green, poppy-red, and pale yellow. Jourdy draws slice-of-life at its best. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A masterpiece... I’m absolutely mad about this book, the best graphic novel I’ve read so far this year.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

“Camille Jourdy’s Juliette may be the most sedate comic of the summer. It might also be the best.” —Washington Post

“This book is worth reading for its gorgeous art alone, expressing a wide palette of feelings spread across members of this torn, but still loving, family.” —NPR

“Jourdy’s detailed watercolor style is full of depth and colorful details. Juliette is an engaging story of a family in flux, perfect for fans of Daniel Clowes.” —Booklist

“Jourdy draws slice-of-life at its best.” —Publishers Weekly

“Executed in watercolour and consistently blushing with pigment, Juliette takes us behind the curtains and beneath the sheets.” —ArtReview

“Family dysfunction, mental illness, and alcoholic malaise are hardly uplifting topics, yet French author and illustrator Camille Jourdy manages to utterly delight in Juliette... Jourdy's whimsically expressive watercolors highlight and enhance the quotidian humanity of a family in crisis without ever diminishing the gravity of her characters' challenges.” —Shelf Awareness

“The author shows every indication of having found and refined her visual signature to perfection... [Juliette is a] brilliantly affecting book.” —Montreal Review of Books

“Filled with the dappled brightness of happiness and suffering, Juliette is suffused with all the heartbreaking foibles of us humans and our ongoing quests for love.” —The Tyee

“Camille Jourdy blends magic with melancholy to create an exquisite comic experience.” —Broken Frontier

“Juliette is rich, dense, and melancholic with enormous attention paid to detail in all its forms. It’s a graphic novel to treasure and to re-read.” —Slings & Arrows

“Utterly lovely [and] pleasingly unhurried… Jourdy gives over whole pages to empty streets in springtime, or still lifes where you can almost feel the sunlight hanging in the air.” —The Telegraph

“My favourite graphic novel of the year, [a] funny and gorgeously illustrated book about a depressed young woman who returns to the small French town where she grew up.” —The Guardian, Rachel Cooke’s Best Graphic Novels of 2023

From the Publisher