This odd combination of specificity and vagueness is more about the protagonist’s personal arc than about art.
A girl becomes attached to a piece of art in a gallery.
Exploring a new city with her older brother, the first-person narrator wanders into an art gallery and falls in love with a bronze sculpture of a girl in a rocking chair with a cat. Nine-year-old Caroline bonds with the sculpture, running her hands over it and talking to it: about ice cream, about being forced to give away her own cat when her family moved, and about not having friends. When the sculpture’s due to leave the gallery, Caroline gathers her spare change and begs for it to stay, spurring a donation campaign that succeeds. Brenna’s core arc is true: a real White girl in 1966, a sculpture, a handwritten letter, a donation campaign. Caroline Markham’s full name, relevant city names (Saskatoon, Toronto, Ottawa), and even the gallery director’s name are specified in the main text; egregiously, the real sculptor, Arthur Price, goes unnamed—even in the backmatter (he is named in flap copy). Kerrigan’s rendering of the sculpture is too watery and low-saturation to evoke bronze; the gallery’s many paintings—which Caroline also loves—are visually pleasant and peaceful but indistinct. Inexplicably, the text minutely changes the sculpture’s name—from Girl With Cat to The Girl and the Cat—and changes the Mendel Art Gallery to the generic Art Gallery.
This odd combination of specificity and vagueness is more about the protagonist’s personal arc than about art. (author's note, photos) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-88995-531-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Red Deer Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
A raging storm is prelude to a miracle at sea. Battering rain, howling wind and the crash of waves add up to danger off the coast of the Farne Islands in England. Inside the lighthouse, Gracie the cat and her kitten are warm and snug in the parlor. The sound of running footsteps intrigues the kitten, who rushes to investigate. The front door is open—the lighthouse keeper and his daughter are braving the choppy waters in their rowboat to rescue passengers of a wrecked ship—and a gale-force wind lifts the kitten and deposits him in the sea. Gracie is distraught; as the rescued climb the stone steps to the lighthouse, she cries frantically. But it's hopeless...until she spots the kitten, soaking wet and terrified and clinging to the rocks. Gracie picks him up and whisks him to safety. This tale of feline excitement takes place with the true-life story of Grace Darling's famous 1838 rescue as its backdrop. Readers can see Grace and her father and the soggy ship's passengers they save from the battering seas, although the very simple text focuses only on Gracie and the kitten. (Brief notes on the endpapers fill in the history.) Brown's elegant pictures (no one does cats quite like her) suggest, in the best possible way, Classics Illustrated comics, and her story is similarly robust and interesting. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7613-7454-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Andersen Press USA
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
A pleasing little window into Dickinson’s life and an invitation to learn more about the fresh-breathed poet from Amherst.
Emily Dickinson did have a love interest. His name was Carlo.
He was a dog, a Newfoundland, a great, slobbering, shaggy mess of a creature, which undercuts any notions of primness modern readers may harbor of Miss Dickinson. As Figley draws forth their gathering affection, she reveals important aspects of Dickinson’s relationship to the world, her deep-running shyness that led to a reclusive life. But her time with Carlo, some 16 years, was full of beauty and meaning, as expertly coaxed from her poems and letters. The path to her brother’s house, “just wide enough for two who love”; “I started early, took my dog, / And visited the sea.” They were a couple, surely—they shared sweeps of time, they endured separations, they went calling—and when the end came for Carlo, Dickinson did not dodge the sting: “ ’Twas my one glory— / Let it be / Remembered / I was owned of thee.” And if a moodiness still pervades the proceedings, something blue, the tone is lifted by Stock’s watercolors, which are as drenched in color as a sun room painted by Childe Hassam.
A pleasing little window into Dickinson’s life and an invitation to learn more about the fresh-breathed poet from Amherst. (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58089-274-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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