The lives of Engales and James form the two main threads of story, with their fortunes rising and falling as precipitously as anything in 1980s' New York. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a sweepingly large and profound story about art, love and actualization, cleanly and beautifully composed.
Says an art dealer with more influence than she perhaps deserves: "I've always found Tuesdays so charming, haven't you? I do everything on Tuesdays." The action tends to take place on Tuesdays, which sounds like a cumbersome and effortful device, but in fact flows smoothly and almost invisibly, following the lives of a few individuals in a city and an art scene big enough to swallow them. Molly Prentiss's striking first novel, Tuesday Nights in 1980, covers one year, from December 31, 1979, through the final days of 1980. If he could only get someone important to look at it. He knows his work is better than any of what's being sold in the big galleries. Also in the city, Raul Engales works night and day at his art, painting in poached studio space at New York University, a school he does not attend. But he's finally made it, as an art critic for the New York Times. The country is in the midst of the turmoil called the Dirty War kidnappings are on the rise, and Franca is frightened: she has been baking cakes for an underground group that records the names of the "disappeared." In New York, a man named James Bennett has had a harder time than most finding his way in life: his synesthesia always made him exceptionally strange, as he refers to colors, sounds and smells no one else sensed. In Buenos Aires, a woman named Franca is raising her son alone. Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness Micha Archer's authorial debut is a creative introduction to poetry as a lens on the world, and her gorgeous collage and oil artwork is not to be missed. To a frog in Daniel Finds a Poem (Nancy Paulsen/Penguin, ages 4-8), it's "a cool pool to dive into." To a turtle it's "sun-warmed sand." To Daniel, wandering through an urban park, it's a dreamy synthesis of all the animals' impressions. Kolar's undersea world is luminous and dynamic, evoking the crisp cartoonishness of animated film. You're big/ and bad and mean." "Wobbegong" is next: "Wibbly wobbly wobbegong,/ shagginess drips as he swims along." Brief notes offer up intriguing shark facts. Starting out with "Great White Shark," Brown writes "Okay./ We get/ it. Whether children are obsessed with or terrified by sharks, they will find 14 excellent read-aloud poems here. Skila Brown ( Caminar) makes her picture-book debut with Slickety Quick: Poems about Sharks (Candlewick, ages 6-9), illustrated by Bob Kolar ( The Little School Bus). Here, Singer's poems reflect 14 classic Greek myths, such as "Pandora and the Box:" "She just had to be curious,/ that Pandora./ Blast her!" (A brief note explains the myth in question.) Masse's acrylic illustrations, awash in Mediterranean light, are often cleverly distorted mirrors of each other, stylish and striking,
The trick of reverso poems is that you read them one way, then read the same lines in reverse order, which changes the perspective in surprising, brain-teasing ways. Shelf Awareness celebrates the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month with this tantalizing trio of poetry picture books.Ĭhildren bitten by the Greek mythology bug will be fascinated by Echo, Echo: Reverso Poems about Greek Myths (Dial/Penguin, ages 7-12) by Marilyn Singer, illustrated by Canadian artist Josée Masse, the team behind Mirror, Mirror and Follow, Follow.