Orla's Canvas - Softcover

Sharnick, Mary Donnarumma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942756208 ISBN 13: 9781942756200

Publisher: Penmore Press LLC, 2015

Synopsis

Narrated by eleven-year-old Orla Gwen Gleason, Orla's Canvas opens on Easter Sunday, in St. Suplice, Louisiana, a "misspelled town" north of New Orleans, and traces Orla's dawning realization that all is not as it seems in her personal life or in the life of her community. The death of St. Suplice's doyenne, Mrs. Bellefleur Dubois Castleberry, for whom Orla's mother keeps house, reveals Orla's true paternity, shatters her trust in her beloved mother, and exposes her to the harsh realities of class and race in the Civil Rights-era South. When the Klan learns of Mrs. Castleberry's collaboration with the local Negro minister and Archbishop Rummel to integrate the parochial school, violence fractures St. Suplice's vulnerable stability. The brutality Orla witnesses at summer's end awakens her to life's tenuous fragility. Like the South in which she lives, she suffers the turbulence of changing times. Smart, resilient, and fiercely determined to make sense of her pain, Orla paints chaos into beauty, documenting both horror and grace, discovering herself at last through her art. "Taking as her canvas the Civil Rights era in Louisiana, Mary Donnarumma Sharnick tells the affecting story of Orla, a remarkable young heroine with the soul of an artist. The novel is both a gripping look into a historic moment in American culture and a poignant coming-of-age story readers won't forget." - Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels

About this title

Review:

"Orla's Canvas is a lyrical, poignant story of a young talented girl coming of age in the dawning Civil Rights era in the South.  Orla's art is her window on the world, a world she valiantly struggles to make sense of.  More than once, I thought of another southern girl, this one named Scout.  For good reason; Orla's Canvas is an American classic for our times." James R. Benn, author of the acclaimed Billy Boyle Series
 Refusing her characters, and her readers, the option of keeping the past locked in the past, Sharnick instead suggests that yesterday's story bleeds into and informs today's, and her novel would make an excellent addition to a classroom study of the period, not in place of nonfiction texts, but as a way for high school students to begin to explore the ways in which historical events shaped and continue to shape our senses of self. -- Emma Paine, MLIS Upper School Librarian and Archivist Chase Collegiate School

"Fiction doesn't get much more sensual than this.  Mary Donnarumma Sharnick has given us a stylish and affecting portrait of a young artist--and a still-young country--coming of age together." Louis Bayard, author of Roosevelt's Beast

About this edition

• Publisher: Penmore Press LLC
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1942756208
• ISBN 13: 9781942756200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 278