Calvin (novel)

Calvin is a 2015 young adult novel by Martine Leavitt. It was published by Groundwood Books.

Synopsis

Calvin was born on December 31, 1995 — the day that the last Calvin and Hobbes strip was published. As a child, he played with a stuffed tiger named "Hobbes", and his best friend was named Susie. Eventually, the stuffed tiger fell apart, and Susie made other friends.

When Calvin is 17, he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Constantly hearing Hobbes' voice in his head, he concludes that his only hope is for Bill Watterson to draw one last strip of Calvin as a healthy 17-year-old, and thus — accompanied by Susie — he sets out to walk across the ice of Lake Erie in an attempt to reach Watterson's Cleveland home.

Reception

Calvin won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature.

Publishers Weekly called it "(f)unny, intellectual, and entertaining" and "a sensitive yet irreverent adventure about a serious subject", and noted the possibility that Susie's participation in Calvin's quest may be another hallucination. Kirkus Reviews lauded it as "outstanding" and "far more than the sum of its parts".

At Quill and Quire, Eisha Marjara described the novel as "highly polished", with "virtually flawless" writing and "a plot that could have been hokey but is anything but", and compared Leavitt's dialogue to that of David Mamet. The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books found it to have a "barely credible premise", and to be "schizophrenia-lite" and "more a treatise on philosophy than psychology", but nonetheless praised its "well-paced dialogue", and emphasized its "clever sheen" on "the extreme questions of teenage angst", including "how do we know the difference between what we imagine and what is real", "how should friendships and romantic relationships work", and "how should we grieve the loss of childhood".

Origin

After having written three novels about homelessness, Martine Leavitt realized that the protagonists of those novels had all become homeless for different reasons: abuse, poverty, and addiction. Since another major cause of homelessness is mental illness, she decided that she should eventually write about that topic as well. Subsequently, while rereading a Calvin and Hobbes compilation, she realized that "nowadays, Calvin would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic", and conceived the notion of "Calvin, having schizophrenia, feel[ing] that he's been given this illness by Bill Watterson, his creator" and asking Watterson to cure him; since a pilgrimage to find Bill Watterson did not in itself seem particularly interesting, Leavitt integrated elements from the story of Dave Voelker, who walked across the ice of Lake Erie in winter.