Masterpiece
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4.5 • 95 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Marvin lives with his family under the kitchen sink in the Pompadays' apartment. He is very much a beetle. James Pompaday lives with his family in New York City. He is very much an eleven-year-old boy.After James gets a pen-and-ink set for his birthday, Marvin surprises him by creating an elaborate miniature drawing. James gets all the credit for the picture and before these unlikely friends know it they are caught up in a staged art heist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that could help recover a famous drawing by Albrecht Dürer. But James can't go through with the plan without Marvin's help. And that's where things get really complicated (and interesting!). This fast-paced mystery will have young readers on the edge of their seats as they root for boy and beetle.
In Shakespeare's Secret Elise Broach showed her keen ability to weave storytelling with history and suspense, and Masterpiece is yet another example of her talent. This time around it's an irresistible miniature world, fascinating art history, all wrapped up in a special friendship— something for everyone to enjoy.
Masterpiece is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lesser has become an important translator from German and Swedish; this first Selected Poems from the New York based writer (All We Need of Hell) often shows her thinking about translation living and thinking in more than one language, travel and how to approach a work of art. On the one hand, "Language/ study, first of all, means commitment/ to rules, keeping oneself within lines,/ not reading between them"; on the other, translation can bring "someone else's voice:/ Ringing and lucid, whispered, distant, true." Lesser's attention to prior art includes not just the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Gunnar Ekelof, but also modern figurative paintings: her strongest new poems, a sequence titled "The Girls," describe a disturbing set of canvases by Lena Cronqvist, in which Lesser sees alternate selves and prays: "May they keep/ their heads balanced... smiling heavenward." The earliest poems reflect her undergraduate years at Yale, and her debts to the confessional poetry of the 1970s; the latest describe the old age of Lesser's mother, the end of a transcontinental romance and the memory of mental illness, all in stark, disarming, sometimes plain, lines: "You mentioned ex-/ ploring Vienna's ex-/ pat community I/ fell silent Protected/ from you by my mother/ until she dies."
Customer Reviews
Awesome!!
This book was soooo good! I read it more than 5 times and I will never get tired of it! One of the best books I've ever read! Highly recommended.
Love
Absolutely loved this book and the art background! My students were hooked and so engaged in conversation about this book!
Masterpiece
This book is awesome! If it was on a scale of 1-10 it would be infinity and beyond!!! This is on of the best books ever! I had to read it for Battle of the Books at my school! At first I thought it would be an ok book turns out I was wrong!! I is very detailed and not that hard!!! So if you like art or drawing this would be the book for you!!! Or if you just love reading like me this a good one to read!!!