Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir

I've always liked surprises in my reading - picking up a book with very little idea of what will be in it, and seeing where it goes. That's hard to do a lot of the time, since books try very hard to explain themselves - that's how they attract readers, after all. But some of my best memories, especially of my time at the the book clubs, was picking up a book knowing little more than "this is a medium-future SF book coming from Tor in April, by a writer I'm not familiar with" - and then finding something wonderful.

Not to bury the lede, but: that just happened again.

I grabbed Secret Passages: 1985-1986 at a library, pulling it off the shelf for reasons I can't really explain fully. It was a standalone, it was tall so it stood out, and maybe the deep burgundy spine helped, too. But I'd never heard of the creator Axelle Lenoir, and the book itself was a bit vague - it's some kind of memoir, it says, of the author's life when she was a kid. Something about trees. Something about the death of a cosmic twin - I had a theory about that, which I suspect now is true, but it doesn't really come up in this this book, so I'll leave it there. Stories should be left to tell themselves in their own time.

Secret Passages might become a series: Lenoir covers barely a year here, and doesn't get to the central event she sets up at the beginning. I hope so: there's a lot of great material here, and a lot of room to go forward with it. I don't think this story is anywhere near done.

Lenoir, in the present day, is our narrator: she's going to tell the story of her childhood, all of her big secrets, to lead up to the moment she signposts on the first page: the death of her cosmic twin, her self in another universe, a man we barely see in this book, who died when they both were thirty. That's, I assume, going to be the central spine of the larger Secret Passages project, but this book is about her first year of school and about her fears.

That all sounds big and weighty and potentially dull. But Secret Passages is zippy and energetic and nutty, like a hyperactive six-year-old with more imagination than she knows what to do with. The weighty stuff is all background, or flavor, or moments - this is mostly the story of a very, very square peg finding herself in a round hole and what she does in that spot.

So she attempts to run away into the forest to hide from the first day of school. (That doesn't work; she's afraid of the forest.) She pays very little attention in class, being full of ideas in her own head, and keeps making wrong assumptions. (The first was that "school" would be just one day.) She thinks her parents are aliens - well, the adult Lenoir draws them as aliens, so let's leave that as a "maybe" to figure out later. Her brothers - older David, younger Antonio - are wacky and goofy in their own ways, with little Tonio seemingly haunted by a demon - or maybe that's just his imaginary friend...who is also actually a demon.

Little Axelle is central to all of the chaos, and her adult self is our narrator, but it's a wider world - as little Axelle sees it, of course, which means confused and subtly wrong in spots and full of frightening things. (Axelle was a very frightened child, she makes clear - the forest near her home was the biggest fear, but there were may more.)

This book covers that first school year, up through the summer afterward, culminating in telling a recurring nightmare that Axelle started having at that time - and had for years to come. Again, the book is mostly funny, but can drop into a more dramatic mode instantly, the way that kids' lives can switch from silly to dead-serious at any time. Lenoir has an amazing control of tone here, both in her captions and drawings - the book has a loose, I'm-just-telling-you-this-story-as-it-comes-to-me air, but it's clearly much more carefully constructed and arranged, the product of a comics creator with a bunch of projects behind her and a confidence in her own powers.

(This is even more impressive when you realize that Lenoir's previous works - most of them, at least; I'm not sure where the dividing line was - were in her native French; she's from Quebec and one of several unstated things in this book is that everyone is actually speaking French. This book doesn't credit a translator, but her previous books in English did - that doesn't prove anything, but I think it means this is Lenoir's first work created in English.)

I was hugely impressed with Secret Passages. I'm going to be looking to see what else Lenoir has done - but, even more so, what I want is Secret Passages 1987 or whatever comes next. This is a big, impressive work of comics memoir from a creator with a lot more to say, and we should be in for a few more books equally strong.