Graven Images
Graven Images
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Overview
Paul Fleischman, in his Newbery Honor winning book, spins three engrossing stories about the unexpected ways an artist's creations reveal truths - tales whose intriguing plots and many moods will entertain readers and inspire future writers.
Can wood, copper, or marble communicate? They can if they are the graven images in Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman’s trio of eerie, beguiling short stories. If you whisper a secret into a wooden statue’s ear, will anyone find out? Can a wobbly weathervane bearing the image of Saint Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, steer a love-struck apprentice toward the girl of his dreams? And if a ghost hires a sculptor to carve a likeness of him holding a drink to a baby’s lips, what ghastly crime might lie behind his request? And, in a brand-new afterword, the acclaimed storyteller reveals how he found his own author’s voice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780763674274 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Candlewick Press |
| Publication date: | 08/05/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Lexile: | 870L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 Years |
About the Author
“Step into the wood-shingled house I grew up in, and into the past. You find us gathered in the living room, listening to my writer father, Sid Fleischman, reading his latest chapter aloud. Outside, the breeze off the Pacific, ten blocks away, streams through the fruit trees my parents have planted and rustles the cornfield in our front yard — the only cornfield in all of Santa Monica, California.”
Scant surprise that Paul Fleischman grew up to write Weslandia, about a grammar-school misfit who founds a new civilization in his suburban backyard, built around a mysterious wind-sown plant. A taste for nonconformity and a love of the plant world run through many of his books, including Animal Hedge, in which a father uses a clipped shrub to guide his sons in choosing their careers.
“My mother plays piano, my father classical guitar. From upstairs that evening comes the entrancing sound of my sisters playing a flute duet. The house resounds with Bach, Herb Alpert, Dodgers games, and Radio Peking coming from my shortwave radio.”
From that musical, multitrack upbringing came Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, winner of the Newbery Medal, and Big Talk, its sequel for a quartet of speakers. It’s also the source of the author’s madcap play, Zap, a theatrical train wreck of seven simultaneous plays, the result of a stage company’s attempt to compete with TV.
“My father’s interest in things historical has led to the purchase of a hand printing press. We’ve all learned to set type. I have my own business, printing stationery for my parents’ friends. I read type catalogs along with Dylan Thomas and Richard Brautigan.”
History has informed many of Paul’s books, from the colonial settings of his Newbery Honor book Graven Images, inspired by his years living in a two-hundred-year-old house in New Hampshire, to the newly updated Dateline: Troy, which juxtaposes the Trojan War story with strikingly similar newspaper clippings from World War I to the Iraq War.
“An old issue of Mad magazine sits on a table, along with a copy of the Daily Sun-Times and Walnut, the satiric underground paper I started with two friends, which landed us in the dean’s office today—again.”
What better education for the future author of A Fate Totally Worse Than Death, a wicked parody of teen horror novels,? Or for the visual humor of Sidewalk Circus, a wordless celebration of how much more children see than their elders?
“Thirty-five years later, I still draw on Bach, living-room theater, the look of letters on a page, and still aspire to the power of a voice coming from a radio late at night in a pitch-black room.”
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When the brig Orion, three weeks out from Havana, appeared off her home port of New Bethany, Maine, Miss Evangeline Frye was just parting her bed curtains, formally banishing night.
While those who'd chanced to spy the sails wondered why the ship hadn't fired a salute, Miss Frye was combing her coarse, gray hair. While the Orion drifted unexpectedly about, at last presenting her stem to the harbor, Miss Frye was blowing the hearth fire into being. And while the harbor pilot's drowsy son rowed his father out to the ship, to return in a frenzy, eyes wide and hands trembling, Miss Frye was stationed at her parlor window, awaiting the sight of Sarah Peel.
She peered down the length of Bartholomew Street. Straight-spined as a mast and so tall that her gaze was aimed out through the top row of windowpanes, Miss Frye eyed the clock on the town hall next door. It was eight fifteen. The girt was late-and plenty of scrubbing and spinning to be done.
She pursed her lips, lowered her eyes, and looked out upon her flower garden. It was nearly Independence Day-tansy was thriving, pinks were in bloom, marigolds were budding on schedule. But the poppy seeds she'd bought from a rogue of a peddler, and gullibly planted with care, still hadn't sent up a single shoot. And probably never would, she reflected. In memory, she heard her mother's voice: "Girls take after their mothers, Evangeline. Men take after the Devil." She regarded the bare stretch of soil below, sneering at this latest confirmation.
The door knocker sounded. Miss Frye opened up and was surprised to find not Sarah Peel, but her ten-year-old younger sister, Tekoa.
"I'vecome to do chores, ma'am."
Miss Frye cocked her head. "But where is Sarah?"
"In bed, ma'am. Taken ill." The girl spoke softly, tucking a strand of straw-blond hair under her kerchief.
"Well then." Miss Frye motioned her in and closed the door behind her. "I suppose you've had practice scouring pewter."
Tekoa stood in the hallway, silent.
Miss Frye blinked her eyes. Was this some impertinence? Then at once she recalled what Sarah had told her-that the girl had been left deaf by a fever and was able to listen only with her eyes, by reading the words on others' lips.
Miss Frye passed Tekoa, then turned to face her.
"You can begin with the pewter."
"Yes, ma'am," said the girl.
Miss Frye led her down the hall to the kitchen. "And what manner of illness has seized poor Sarah?"
"Her jaws," said Tekoa. "They won't come open."
Miss Frye appeared startled. "And when did this happen?"
"This morning, just after the news of the Orion."
Miss Frye's eyebrows jerked. "The Orion? What news?" Among the crew of New Bethany boys was Miss Frye's adopted son, Ethan.
"She appeared offshore this morning, ma'am," Tekoa calmly replied.
At once Miss Frye rushed to the window.
"All of the crew were found to be dead."
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