Frida Kahlo: The Revolutionary Painter!

by James Buckley Jr, Cassie Anderson (Illustrator)

Overview

This kid-friendly biography of esteemed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo uses a graphic novel format to tell the true story of the woman who led an artistic revolution.

After an accident at age 18 dashed her dream of attending medical school and becoming a doctor, Frida Kahlo turned to painting as a form of therapy. Over the next few years, she developed an introspective and surrealist style that soon became a sensation in the art world. By incorporating aspects of Mexican folk art with deeply personal themes, Kahlo’s paintings revolutionized not only Mexican art but the very essence of what art could be. Frida Kahlo: Revolutionary Painter! is a biography of this groundbreaking artist, told in a full-color graphic novel format that will appeal to a wide audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645174332
Publisher:	Portable Press
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Series:	Show Me History!
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	GN630L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

James Buckley Jr. is a prolific author of nonfiction for young readers, with more than 150 books to his credit (and still typing!). He is the author of more than a dozen titles in The New York Times' best-selling "Who Was...?" biography series, including the Wright Brothers, Milton Hershey, Betsy Ross, Jules Verne, and Blackbeard. Buckley has written more than thirty DK Readers on a wide variety of topics, plus two recent long-form bios of Adolf Hitler and Bonnie and Clyde for Aladdin Books. For Spring 2019, he created the first book in a new series for Aladdin—a bio of astronaut Michael Collins. Buckley is the co-author of Time Inc./Liberty Street's "X-Why-Z" series and wrote and produced the Animal Planet Animal Atlas for Liberty Street. A former editor at Sports Illustrated and the National Football League, he lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he runs a successful book producing company.

Cassie Anderson is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creator behind the webcomic-turned-graphic novel Extraordinary: The Story of An Ordinary Princess, as well as the artist and letterer on the Lifeformed series, a sci-fi YA comic about growing up and doing hard things set in an alien invasion. Both books are published by Dark Horse Comics. She also enjoys making journal and autobiographical comics about her life. When she's not drawing comics, Cassie can be found baking tasty treats or exploring the great outdoors.

Editorial Reviews

10/15/2021

Gr 3–5—Young versions of the Statue of Liberty ("Libby") and Uncle Sam ("Sam") squire viewers through a lively graphic recap of Frida Kahlo's life of chronic pain and art—tracing especially her successful efforts to escape the large shadow of her husband, Diego Rivera (with whom she had "one of the most famous and spicy relationships in art history") and be recognized as a powerful artist in her own right. Her force-of-nature personality comes through in Anderson's cartoon panels as she fiercely battles not just critical condescension but polio, miscarriages, a horrific bus accident in her youth, and other catastrophes in the course of a career driven as much by political activism as by art. Her vivid sense of fashion also shines, and if her marvelously unsettling paintings are only impressionistically rendered by Anderson, tantalized readers will find a select set of leads to multimedia visual resources following the closing time line and gallery of other renowned woman artists. VERDICT Focusing on the many obstacles with which Kahlo was confronted, this work does a good job outlining the life of a strong, independent woman to emulate.—John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, NY

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