PIECES OF GEORGIA

Sometimes novels-in-verse allow a kind of calligraphic freedom of description and emotion, as in this gentle story. When Georgia turns 13, someone sends her a membership to the Brandywine Museum, which is not far from where she lives. Georgia loves to draw: Her mother was an artist, and neither Georgia nor her father has gotten over her death six years earlier. Georgia tells her tale in her journal, given to her by an understanding teacher, and addresses herself to her Momma. In the seventh grade, she makes a friend, thinks hard about the Wyeths at the museum, helps her father open his closed memories of her mother and makes a portfolio for an art program. Her voice is natural and plainspoken and she thinks about things carefully as she moves forward in her life. The moment in which she finds out who gave her the museum membership is moving and lovely and is the perfect signature on this affecting work of art. (Fiction. 9-12)