A thorough, sensitive portrayal of one of literature’s most remarkable authors, illustrated with period portraits and...
“Every thing must have a beginning…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.”
Mary Shelley’s mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died 11 days after her daughter was born. Reef (Victoria, 2017, etc.) describes Mary’s upbringing at the hands of her “grave and severe” father, William Godwin, and her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont; and in the company of their children. Godwin was an atheist, a radical thinker, and a prolific author who believed in the importance of holistic education. His revolutionary views intrigued the precocious poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who frequented the Godwin home. Believing that Shelley was only interested in intellectual ideas, Godwin was shocked to discover that the charismatic poet and his 16-year-old daughter had fallen hopelessly in love. Hastily revising his liberal views, he forbade their union. Thus began a series of extraordinary adventures, from the flight of Mary and Percy to Europe, where they led a restless life, suffering the deaths of all but one of their children, culminating in Percy’s tragic drowning off the Italian coast. Reef skillfully analyzes how Mary Shelley’s terrible losses and her broad education and life experience influenced her extraordinary literary achievement, which included six novels in addition to the supremely influential Frankenstein.
A thorough, sensitive portrayal of one of literature’s most remarkable authors, illustrated with period portraits and engravings. (notes, bibliography, Mary Shelley’s works, index) (Biography. 12-18)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-74005-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
This deeply personal and boldly political offering inspires and ignites.
Curator, author, and activist Drew shares her journey as an artist and the lessons she has learned along the way.
Drew uses her own story to show how deeply intertwined activism and the arts can be. Her choices in college were largely overshadowed by financial need, but a paid summer internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem became a formative experience that led her to major in art history. The black artists who got her interested in the field were conspicuously absent in the college curriculum, however, as was faculty support, so she turned her frustration into action by starting her own blog to boost the work of black artists. After college, Drew’s work in several arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, only deepened her commitment to making the art world more accessible to people of color and other marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, and widening the scope of who is welcomed there. Drew narrates deeply personal experiences of frustration, triumph, progress, learning, and sometimes-uncomfortable growth in a conversational tone that draws readers in, showing how her specific lens enabled her to accomplish the work she has done but ultimately inviting readers to add their own contributions, however small, to both art and protest.
This deeply personal and boldly political offering inspires and ignites. (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09518-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love.
As palliative for his beloved Abuela's worsening dementia, memoirist Ogle offers her a book of childhood recollections.
Cast in episodic rushes of free verse and paralleling events chronicled in Free Lunch (2019) and Punching Bag (2021), the poems take the author from age 4 until college in a mix of love notes to his devoted, hardworking, Mexican grandmother; gnawing memories of fights and racial and homophobic taunts at school as he gradually becomes aware of his sexuality; and bitter clashes with both his mother, described as a harsh, self-centered deadbeat with seemingly not one ounce of love to give or any other redeeming feature, and the distant White father who threw him out the instant he came out. Though overall the poems are less about the author’s grandmother than about his own angst and issues (with searing blasts of enmity reserved for his birthparents), a picture of a loving intergenerational relationship emerges, offering moments of shared times and supportive exchanges amid the raw tallies of beat downs at home, sudden moves to escape creditors, and screaming quarrels. “My memories of a wonderful woman are written in words and verses and fragments in this book,” he writes in a foreword, “unable to be unwritten. And if it is forgotten, it can always be read again.”
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love. (Verse memoir. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-01995-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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