Landis Blair

Very much enjoyed the first section, “The Malicious Playground”! Rhymes like “The jungle gym at best condones the shattering of all your bones.” are fun to read - and true!
“The Envious Siblings” section is also a good rhyme, and pretty gross! Actually, the whole book is dark, macabre, and yes, gross. So, it's a good read for someone like me, but probably not for kids. And the artwork is pretty dang good, but also pretty graphic. Don't be fooled by the "nursery rhymes" part of the show more title! Focus on the "morbid"!!!

"A floor of meat cannot be beat, we love a corpse beneath our feet." show less

An incredible true crime graphic novel, less about crimes and more about ultimate truths. The plot moves along at a good pace. Not so fast as to leave you unsatisfied and not so slow as to be a slog. The art style is untrained but very expressive, dark and at times relentlessly gory and disturbing.

I had trouble liking this book as the first half is slow, meandering and filled with what seems like unnecessary psychedelic imagery for a pedestrian domestic drama and pages crosshatched to the point of being nearly completely black. Even the midpoint turn to being a prison drama and the introduction of a infamous murderer Nathan Leopold didn't pull the book out of its downward spiral. But slowly as the book neared its end, my boredom spiral synched up to the suicidal spiral of the main show more character and his study of Dante's Inferno and started to turn around as things turned around for him. The imagery and themes came together in the conclusion and lifted the whole book in my estimation.

Unfortunately, the one part that finds no redemption in my opinion are the actual writing samples of the blind father, Matt Rizzo. I found those passages a chore to read and understand why they were repeatedly passed over for publication. show less

When I am asked what I like to read, I generally tell people that it's easier to share what I don't like to read since my actual reading is so randomly eclectic. That said, one of the few areas of the bookstore/library that I steer clear of on a regular basis is the true crime section. Another area is that of graphic novels and memoirs. And a third is poetry. The Hunting Accident is the both of the first two with sections of the third. So what gives, right? Why on earth did I ever pick this show more up and read it? Sometimes people I trust can get me to edge out of my comfort zone just a little bit and this is one of those rare times. Although I still won't be searching out those sections of the bookstore, it was interesting indeed to read something so unlike my usual choices.

Charlie Rizzo is just a young boy when his mother and grandmother take him from Chicago to California. After his mother's death, Charlie, still young, goes back to Chicago and his father. He has to adjust to a whole new life, not the least of which is his father's blindness, ostensibly a result of a youthful hunting accident, and the way that this disability makes Charlie his father's caretaker in ways that he comes to resent as he grows. As Charlie gets older, he falls in with a bad group of kids and starts heading down a path that has no good end and very probably only ends in jail time or worse. It is to this defiant but still pliable son on the cusp of adulthood that Matt Rizzo finally tells the real story of his blindness, what shaped him into the man he became, and continued to impact and change his life, including his marriage, long after the events were past.

Growing up in Chicago's Little Italy, Matt Rizzo was blinded not in a hunting accident but during a job for the Mob. Newly blind and increasingly depressed, he ends up in Stateville Prison in special housing with a notorious and terrifying cellmate: Nathan Leopold of Leopold and Loeb fame. (Note that the murder these two committed was grisly and horrifying so you may or may not want to look it up.) Oddly enough, his association with this infamous sociopath leads him to learn braille and to discover the power of reading and writing. And ultimately he bequeaths his story and his lifetime of writing to his son Charlie in the hopes that this information will help turn Charlie around and that Charlie will keep his story alive.

This is an enormous book, break your wrist enormous and I'm not entirely convinced it needs to be so long. The illustrations are black and white and covered in tiny cross-hatchings that contribute to a feeling of darkness, bleakness, and despair. But this is more than just the black tale of Matt Rizzo's crime and punishment, it is also at its heart the story of parenting, of a father and son trying to come together, of a father wanting a different life for his son, a better life. The stories contained in it expand outward, each framed by another and another, all tied thematically, explicitly and not explicitly, to Dante's Inferno, chronicling both Dante and Matt Rizzo's journeys through Hell. There are pieces of Matt's own writing included in the text and while it is understandable why they were included, they are rather baffling bits of writing. On the whole, Charlie's story is less interesting than his father's so the book is slow going until Matt finds it necessary to tell Charlie his own life story, at which point it picks up. Over all, I appreciate the idea of redemption through literature and of the surprising turn Matt Rizzo's life takes living with Nathan Leopold but the fact that poetry, graphic non-fiction, and true crime are not my bailiwick combined with the unrelenting darkness of the tale and its drawings made me unable to fully appreciate this as so many others have. Looking at other reviews, I am firmly in the minority though so if anything about this book has piqued your interest, by all means do grab a copy and form your own opinions. show less