All the Greys on Greene Street
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"A dazzling debut novel about resilience, courage, home and family."--Rebecca Stead, Newbery Award-winning author of When You Reach Me
SoHo, 1981. Twelve-year-old Olympia is an artist--and in her neighborhood, that's normal. Her dad and his business partner Apollo bring antique paintings back to life, while her mother makes intricate sculptures in a corner of their loft, leaving Ollie to roam the streets of New York with her best friends Richard and Alex, drawing everything that catches her eye.
Then everything falls apart. Ollie's dad disappears in the middle of the night, leaving her only a cryptic note and instructions to destroy it. Her mom has gone to bed, and she's not getting up. Apollo is hiding something, Alex is acting strange, and Richard has questions about the mysterious stranger he saw outside. And someone keeps calling, looking for a missing piece of art. . . .
Olympia knows her dad is the key--but first, she has to find him, and time is running out.
Lauded by critics in five starred reviews, All the Greys on Greene Street has been called "a remarkable debut" and "a triumph."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's spring 1981, and Ollie, 12, is trying her best to keep her sculptor mother's latest depressive episode a secret. Her mom hasn't gotten out of bed since a week after Ollie's art restorer father fled mysteriously to France in the middle of the night, leaving behind a cryptic note for Ollie alone. The cautious girl declines to share either piece of information with the sympathetic grown-ups in her life, including her father's business partner, the dependable Apollo, who teaches her about mixing pigments and with whom her father quarreled about an enigmatic wooden statue before he left. Ollie herself is an observant and talented sketch artist, and her creative sensibility shines through in Murphy's spot illustrations and the lovely first-person narrative (a building is said to be "wearing its own fire escape like the hard jewelry on the girls outside the bars on St. Mark's Place"). Tucker skillfully balances themes of mental illness, friendship, and creativity under tough circumstances in her memorable debut. The vibrant, eccentric characters are authentic, the early-1980s SoHo setting is clearly wrought (rich with descriptive details such as fad diets and artist-in-residence lofts), and the Konigsburg-tinged art mystery satisfies. Ages 8 12.
