April Recommendations

Novels:

In BLOOD WATER PAINT, by Joy McCullough, seventeen-year-old painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, works as her father’s apprentice in 17th-century Rome, where women are merely "beauty/ for consumption.” When she’s raped by the man giving her art lessons, she immediately understands: "He is teacher, I am student,/ man and girl/ power, nothing…." Artemisia brings charges against her rapist even though she knows it's unlikely she will win. This is historical fiction about an iconic painter, based on transcripts from her trial. Told in luminous verse, it tackles issues of gender and power in a way that is relevant today. (YA)

In DREAD NATION, by Justina Ireland, life would have been very different for Jane McKeene if the dead hadn’t “started to walk” in Gettysburg two days after she was born. Jane, aged seventeen, attends Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls just outside Baltimore, where she learns the fine art of killing “shamblers” who have terrorized the country since the War Between the States. When Jane, along with ex-beau Jackson Keats and fellow student (and nemesis) Katherine Deveraux, stumbles upon a plot that has white families and their black Attendants going missing, the trio find themselves captured and loaded aboard a train bound for a Survivalist compound in Kansas. There, they encounter a society based on the message of “securing the safety of white Christian men and women,” and restoring the nation to “its former glory.” Witty, subversive, and full of action, this is another story about power--and lack of it —that should be relevant to readers today. Great characters. I’m hoping for a sequel! (YA)

TESS OF THE ROAD, by Rachel Hartman, is the first in a fantasy duology by the author of Seraphina and Shadow Scale. When high-spirited Tess Dombegh is six, her energetic attempts to discover "the mystical origins of babies" disappoint her devout mama, and Tess realizes that she'll have to work much harder than her twin sister, Jeanne, to make it into heaven. Ten years later, Tess is a lady-in-waiting at court. She has the "whiff of scandal" about her, so it's up to sweet, virtuous Jeanne to marry and save the family from poverty. When eligible Lord Richard proposes to Jeanne, Tess dares to hope that she might finally be free to pursue her own interests, but after making a horrible, drunken mess of Jeanne's wedding, a convent becomes Tess's only apparent option. That is, until Tess is gifted with a pair of fine leather boots that "[seem] to be a suggestion” and she runs off to a distant city to make a new start as a seamstress. She meets up with her old best friend, the "lizardy" quigutl (a subspecies of dragon) named Pathka, who is on a journey of his own. This is the same world as the Seraphina books, but this time we get to know the unquenchable Tess, whose life has so far been constrained by shame and the medieval expectations of others. Three thumbs up! (YA)

Picture Books:

With delightful illustrations, rhythm, rhyme, and lots and lots of onomatopoeia, WATERSONG, written by Tim McCanna, illustrated by Richard Smythe, follows one fox through a rainstorm and out the other side. Really fun to read aloud!

Poems by Nikki Giovanni, art by Ashely Bryan, what more can I say? I AM LOVED will “lyric you in lilacs” as you feast on its sumptuous spread.

THE FISH AND THE CAT, by Marianne Dubuc, is a wordless picture book, featuring an undaunted cat chasing an elusive fish through water, air, and outer space. Dubuc’s appealingly stylized art perfectly captures the nature of her cat (while her fish defies categorization!) in this unhurried pursuit through realms of imagination. Quirky with plenty of charm.

--Lynn