LOVE IS HARD WORK

A vibrant but ultimately disappointing profile of the influential artist and social activist.

Unfortunately, this picture-book biography’s appeal for younger audiences will be largely confined to the illustrations. True to the subject’s visual style and predilection for combining punchy imagery drawn from daily life with powerful words, the artwork offers stimulating scenes of densely cluttered studios and bustling public spaces exploding with dazzling colors and eye-catching signs and slogans. Alas, Paley weighs down the narrative with abstract, cerebral references to the artist’s “innate talent and creative yearning” in childhood, the “interplay of elements” that marked her mature style, the ways she taught her students to find “new connections between disparate objects,” and how she “engaged with the overlapping artistic and social revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s to spur change.” He’s clear about the importance of faith and scripture to Kent from her youth on, even after she renounced her vows as a nun rather than knuckle under to a conservative cardinal in the wake of Vatican II. He ends his biographical overview in 1968—she lived and worked for 18 more years before dying of cancer in 1986—to close with summarizing praise of her social activism and loving message. Though she’s misleadingly shown in a nun’s habit for the book’s final image (she wears secular clothing in the previous picture), she appears throughout among racially and culturally diverse fellow artists and activists. The book lacks a timeline, and the select list of information sources is weighted toward adult readers.

Evocative visuals wasted on an uninspired narrative.