"For three summers beginning when he was 16, cartoonist Guy Delisle worked at a pulp and paper factory in Quebec City. Factory Summers chronicles the daily rhythms of life in the mill, and the twelve-hour shifts he spent in a hot, noisy building filled with arcane machinery. Delisle takes his noted outsider perspective and applies it domestically, this time as a boy amongst men through the universal rite of passage of the summer job. Even as a teenager, Delisle's keen eye for hypocrisy highlights the tensions of class and the rampant sexism an all-male workplace permits... Guy and his dad aren't close, and Guy's witnessing of the workplace politics and toxic masculinity leaves him reconciling whether the job was the reason for his dad's unhappiness. On his days off, Guy found refuge in art, a world far beyond the factory floor. Delisle shows himself rediscovering comics at the public library, and preparing for animation school--only to be told on the first day, 'There are no jobs in animation.' Eager to pursue a job he enjoys and to avoid a career of unhappiness, Guy throws caution to the wind."-- Provided by publisher.
"At the age of sixteen, Guy Delisle takes a summer job at a local paper mill where his father has worked for the past thirty years. While his dad is an engineer with a white collar office, Guy is on the floor among the clanging machines and the cursing lifers. The work oscillates between perilous and mind-numbing. Teenage Guy slowly starts to observe the skill the average factory worker possesses whether it's moving hundreds of pounds of paper with a flick of the wrist or deftly cleaning a wide swath of floor with a blast of compressed air. Guy often spots his father out of the corner of his eye only to lose him and wonder if he was ever there at all. Factory Summers is a wistful, revelatory, nostalgic, funny, and youthful view of how the rest of our lives can so easily be laid out before us. The award-winning cartoonist of Pyongyang and Hostage affirms his status as a brilliant observer of human ecosystems in this, his most personal work yet." -- Publisher's Description.
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