Zibby OnealRecensioni

Would have been better if Oneal didn't shoehorn in Carrie's "cure" and closure. Some of the scenes are written beautifully, especially the ones during her "episodes", but the book starts going downhill the "better" she got, losing the charm it had during Carrie's worst moments.

Grandma Moses, painter of rural America by Zibby Oneal
Interesting audio book about the painter. Starts out when she was just a girl and didn't realize a lot of things, like birthdays.
Liked memories of my past as well, times outside with friends and family during winter months, on the lake, skating and sledding.
Liked hearing of how she painted the walls in her house when she had no money for house paint.
Loved hearing of how she played with dolls, dressing them and knitting.

Lila is a daughter of a weathy family. She never questioned her fathers authority until her grandmother was arrested in a suffrage movement. Lila later understand the reason her grandmother was arrested and that she was standing up for all women adn their right to vote.

I thought this was a very nice short story about a little girl learning about the struggles women go through to fight for equality. Lily is a solid character; The book is too short to do much character-building, but we see her cheering on her grandmother's cause without really thinking too much about it, and then we see her experiencing that same "females can't do these things!" discrimination, and she takes a stand. For such a short book intended for young readers, I think it's well-written and gets the point across.½

Carrie's illness was never given a name, and it was all a bit too easily resolved - she decided that it was time she grew up (symbolised by getting a bra), and everything was going to be fine. But I am rather older than its target audience and I think teenagers would enjoy it more than I did.

It suffered rather in comparison with a novel on the same subject which I read as a teenager "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" by Joanne Greenberg (aka Hannah Green), which goes much more deeply into metal illness and its affect on a teenager and her family.

A Long Way to Go, by Zibby O’Neil, is a work of historical fiction by Zibby O’Neil. It is the story of Lila, a young girl in the midst of WWI America. The year in 1917, and although the war rages on in Europe, at home, in New York City and Washington D.C. the war for Women’s Suffrage rages. The book is centered around Lila discovering her own desire for the right to vote. Her Grandmama is a suffragette, and gets arrested for protesting at the beginning of the book. This gets Lila to thinking about the social inequalities of men and women, and she decides to join the fight.

This book is very short, and it does not have dramatic pauses. It moves quickly and holds the reader’s interest. It is perfect for kids from grades two through five. One thing I found frustrating was that it did not feel historical, but rather more present day. This is for a few reasons. For one, the illustrations did not feel like they were from 1917. Lila’s portrayal is too moody and pushy. For example, on page 41, she is portrayed speaking with her father, but her stance is pushy and snotty, hands on her hips. That is not how a young girl would behave toward her father, in public, in 1917. In the book, she does not act that way, so the picture does not match the actual event of the book. I found them distracting.

Secondly, Lila does not feel like a realistic character. Sometimes she is thinking quite carefully about the topic and wearing her ladylike glove, the next she is punching out her friend for thinking she is delicate, then screaming on the street corner, selling newspapers. The story just felt like someone had written a fake history story with only a real understanding of people today.

I somehow missed this book when I was growing up. I generally skipped directly from kiddie lit to adult books without ever reading through the offerings available for teens although I do still have my old, yellowed copy of Oneal's The Language of Goldfish so she must have been on my radar at some point.

This book is a symphony of color and image, so viscerally visual that Oneal's descriptions easily inhabit the reader's mind's eye. And this is apropos in a book where main character Kate, a high school senior, is the daughter of a famous painter. She used to paint herself but has given it up in an effort to find something that is truly her own: in her case, language and words. Kate has a complicated relationship with her father, thinking that everything in their family is designed to cater to his painting muse and genius. She in antogonistic about what she sees as his dominance so when a graduate student arrives to catalog his paintings for a retrospective, she expects her father to overwhelm and diminish this latest visitor to their home.

But Ian is easy going and charming, recognizing and admiring Marcus Brewer's greatness but not seeming the lesser for this recognition. And as the summer progresses and Kate recovers from the bout of mono that had derailed her original summer plans, she starts to see life, her father, the future, and even her own long dormant talent at painting in a different light thanks to Ian's outlook. A summer where Kate learns about love and disappointment and where she looks beneath the surface of her father, like looking at the way an artist creates the play of light over an image on canvas, the story of Kate's growing up is beautifully rendered.

Impressive given the age of the novel, this book is not dated in any way. It is not long and certainly doesn't focus on the expected tropes of the YA genre but it is timeless and well done. Kate is realistic as is her attitude. I found her frustrating in the beginning, certain that she knew the way that things should be and the ways in which her parents were so wrong, stubborn in her convictions, and unmoved by others' assertions that she doesn't necessarily have the only perspective on things. But her gradual opening up to a bigger reality than she had accounted for showed a young woman coming into her own and becoming an adult. YA fans would do well to revisit this book and even those who missed it the first time around will appreciate it.½

Thirteen-year-old Carrie, clinging to memories of her idyllic early childhood, struggles to communicate with family and classmates.