Child of Glass

Translated from the French, this allegorical story by Alemagna (Harold Snipperpot’s Best Disaster Ever) imagines what it would be like to be made entirely of glass. Gisele blends in “with everything around her... shimmering like a thousand mirrors beneath the moon.” She’s a public sensation (“Can we touch her?”), and her inability to conceal her own thoughts leaves her open to judgment: “Aren’t you ashamed to show such awful things, Gisele?” Wandering from place to place is no help; she’s condemned everywhere she goes. At last her despair turns to self-acceptance and resignation, and she returns home to live in peace, “completely whole in herself.” Alemagna’s story grapples with the dilemma of living a sensitive, authentic public life amid scrutiny and expectation, and her artwork fuses textured collage elements and dreamy, surrealist touches: birds reach to embrace Gisele with human hands, and she cries a tear like a cut diamond. Most inventive are representations of Gisele’s transparent head in leaves of translucent vellum, each page turn penetrating deeper into her mind. Though Gisele survives intact, without breaking, the ordeals she undergoes are sobering and universal. Ages 4–10. (Nov.)