Laura's Bookshelf: The Frame-up

Happy Poetry Friday! Thanks for visiting the Poe House with me last week. I pulled a random name from the comments and Jama Rattigan is the winner of the Poe Keepsake Journal. Congratulations, Jama!Before I get to this week's post, I want to thank Arnold Adoff and the Virginia Hamilton Conference. Last week, I learned that my debut novel, The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, was named the Arnold Adoff Poetry Award for New Voices honor book. "Surprised" is an understatement! It is a huge honor and I'm so grateful for the recognition. Please do visit the full list of award-winners. There are some phenomenal books among the 2018 awardees.It's been over a year since I started keeping a personal bullet journal. (If you're not familiar with bullet journals, start with this post.)Inspired by my educator friends, one of the new things I'm trying with my 2018 journal is tracking my reading. I've kept track via Goodreads before, but charting books is allowing me to take a close look at my genre preferences and how many children's novels I read, versus YA or adult.So far, it looks like this:I am very excited about my most recent read.Wendy McLeod MacKnight's The Frame-up is about  boy who -- spending the summer with his art-gallery-director father -- discovers a great secret. Paintings are alive!Let's say you are a portrait. You keep all of the memories of your living person (the subject of the portrait) until the moment the painting is finished.From that point on, you become your own entity, keeping quiet and still during the day, so museum goers won't guess the truth. At night, you visit friends and neighbors in other paintings. And by visit, I mean going into a painting of a pub to drink and dance with your buddies or, if you're a child, hopping into a seascape with a soothing pier for you to walk around. If that seascape is so soothing that you fall asleep in the painting -- the wrong painting -- no worries ... as long as you're back in your own picture by the time the museum opens.But let's say the gallery director's son, Sargent Singer, happens to come along to the gallery one night and notice that your portrait frame is empty. And then what if he spots you, fast asleep on a pier, in the wrong painting?This is how The Frame-up opens. The painting that Sargent catches is that of a girl about his age, Mona Dunn. (You can view William Orpen's Mona Dunn here.) The two of them spark a secret friendship, chock-full of adventures and mishaps.How serendipitous that I'd have a chance to read the ARC right now, when our February Poetry Project is in the midst of writing in response to art! I know that members of this group are going to love how vividly MacKnight imagines the personalities of several paintings -- all found at the real-life Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada.It's also a super fun book. The climax (involving nefarious goings-on at the gallery) is exciting, both in our world, and in the world of the paintings. And the resolution? It totally tugged at my art-strings. (Get it?)I went back to the first February Poetry Project, looking for a poem to pair with Wendy's book. The theme that year was vintage post cards.Many of those poems were portraits of the people pictured on the cards, but only one imagined that the people in the image are awake, thinking beings.Luckily, this poem is a good fit for Valentine's Week.Cartoon Boy Meets Cartoon GirlBy Laura ShovanYou have no lips to kiss or speak.I have no ears to listen.Let me lean on this picket fence,watch you hoverover a loop of jump rope,your braids drawn upby bat-winged ribbons.You cannot see my baseball capor read my cautious expression.Your lashes fell a moment beforethe cartoonist imagined us.But I will wait. The next panel,with your fluttering lids, must come.The artist -- would he leave usforever like this?Sadly, these two are frozen in their art, unable to move or communicate. They'd much prefer being in the wonderful world of The Frame-up. Find the original post with this postcard and poem at Author Amok.