Girl on a Motorcycle - Hardcover

Novesky, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593116291 ISBN 13: 9780593116296

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers, 2020

Synopsis

A picture book biography by an award-winning team about the first woman to ride a motorcycle around the world

One day, a girl gets on her motorcycle and rides away. She wants to wander the world. To go . . . Elsewhere. This is the true story of the first woman to ride a motorcycle around the world alone. Each place has something to teach her. Each place is beautiful. And despite many flat tires and falls, she learns to always get back up and keep riding.

Award-winning author Amy Novesky and Governor General's Award-winning illustrator Julie Morstad have teamed up for a spectacular celebration of girl power and resilience.

About this title

About the Author

AMY NOVESKY is the author of Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois, which was a Bologna-Ragazzi Award winner and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, as well as Me, Frida, winner of the Pura Belpré Honor Award for illustration. She lives outside of San Francisco with her family.

JULIE MORSTAD is the awardwinning illustrator of The Dress and the Girl; Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova; and Julia, Child, which was a Governor General's Award finalist. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her family.

Reviews

Gr 6–10—Based on Anne-France Dautheville's solo ride around the world in the 1970s, this poetic journey follows an unnamed young Parisian of that era who makes good on her dream "to go Elsewhere." In two epic overland segments she travels across Canada, and then from Bombay to Paris—across vast prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges—stopping for warm encounters with local residents in many lands or (a realistic recurring theme) to repair her motorcycle, but mostly spending long hours alone: "Time passes. And doesn't." Using varied layouts and a shifting monochrome color scheme that lends her unframed panels a retro look, Morstad begins by depicting each tool and personal item the traveler carries in her minimal luggage, then goes on to place gracefully posed figures with expressive, delicate features in settings ranging from looming hills and barren, distant vistas to busy cityscapes. Following a climactic or at least epiphanic, visit to the towering Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan (with a poignant mention of their later destruction), the young woman makes her way home at last, arriving "sunburned, bruised, and beaming." Novesky quotes Dautheville's "I want the world to be beautiful, and it is beautiful./ I want people to be good, and they are good," then concludes the spare narrative with a biographical note illustrated with photos. VERDICT For picture book collections aimed at older readers, this is likely to touch something profound in teen or preteen lovers of Henry David Thoreau's Walden as well as those who hear the siren call of travel.—John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, New York

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593116291
• ISBN 13: 9780593116296
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Morstad Julie
• Number of pages: 48