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The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan

Part of Pantheon Graphic Library

Author Bryan Doerries

Paperback

$19.95 US

Knopf | Pantheon

6.1"W x 9.1"H x 0.5"D (15.5 x 23.1 x 1.3 cm) | 14 oz (399 g) | 36 per carton

On sale Apr 05, 2016 | 160 Pages | 9780375715167

Grades 6-12 + AP/IB

Sales rights: World

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Tragic, poignant, and at times funny and hopeful, this graphic novel brilliantly conveys the profound challenges that many of today’s veterans face upon returning to civilian life, even as it tells “the oldest war story of all time.”

Jack Brennan is a Marine Corps sergeant whose infantry squad has been cleared to return home from a grueling deployment to Afghanistan. A few years prior, Sergeant Brennan lost one of his closest friends—a young combat veteran—to suicide and has vowed to do everything in his power to keep his Marines from a similar fate. On their last night in-country, Brennan, who has long kept a tattered copy of the Odyssey with him on deployment, shares his version of Homer’s classic with his fellow soldiers to help prepare them for the transition back home.

Brennan plunges into a rich retelling of Odysseus’s long journey home from the battlefield at Troy, during which Odysseus and his men confront numerous obstacles—from the lure of a psychedelic lotus plant to ghoulish shades in the Land of the Dead to the seductive songs of the deadly Sirens—as they try to make it back to Greece. Along the way, Brennan and his fellow Marines map the struggles faced by Odysseus and his men onto their own—isolation, addiction, guilt, depression, and loss. Through his retelling, Brennan reminds his squad that the gulf separating the battlefield from the home front is deep, wide, and sometimes hard to cross—that it is possible to travel all the way home and, like the characters in the Odyssey, still feel lost at sea.

“Marine sergeant Jack Brennan’s platoon is on the way home from a grueling deployment to Afghanistan. It’s not the first time through this cycle for Brennan and a couple others, but this time, “He wants to tell us a story,” as one man gripes, before they go home—several stories, actually, from the greatest saga of a soldier going home, The Odyssey… Like a sergeant himself, writer Doerries makes a platoon of artists fall into a consistent style—a kind of stripped-down Swamp Thing look—in both Homeric and contemporary scenes to keep this exercise in comics-as-therapy compelling.”
—Ray Olson, Booklist

BRYAN DOERRIES is a New York-based writer, director, and translator who currently serves as Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, a company that presents dramatic readings of seminal plays and texts to frame community conversations about pressing issues of public health and social justice. A self-described evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help individuals and communities heal from trauma and loss. He is the author of a memoir, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today; All That You've Seen Here Is God, four plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles; and The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan, a graphic novelization of Homer's Odyssey, told from the point of view of a US Marine returning home from Afghanistan. Among his awards, he has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Kenyon College and was named Public Artist in Residence for the City of New York. View titles by Bryan Doerries

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