Heiligman takes readers deep into the teen confusions, romantic skirmishes and intellectual, creative and spiritual rigour both brothers put into making and understanding art, and into their lifelong care for one another.

Passion, intimacy and family love propel this masterful, suitably impressionistic portrait of the relationship of artist Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo. Some of Maud’s turmoils now seem mysteriously tame, but there’s nothing dated about the relentless lack of understanding and warmth she experienced in her family life, something Fishbane conveys with aplomb. Maud doesn’t fill the reader with the super-charged awareness of nature or panoply of imagined worlds and works that might have teemed in Montgomery’s head, but presents forthrightly and unmistakably the loveless, frustrating and even frightening relationships she had with family and unwanted suitors. Montgomery herself wrote vividly - and semi-autobiographically - about the passions of a developing writer in Emily of New Moon and sequels Fishbane’s work is to represent the “real” happenings and relationships of Montgomery’s adolescence. Montgomery Inc., whatever that might mean for latitude in fictionalizing the subject’s lively psyche, dialogue and doings. Not only that, but Maud is authorized by Heirs of L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables and hero to millions of fans. (Penguin, 386 pages $22.99, ages 12 and up)ĭebut novelist Fishbane takes on a daunting challenge, creating a story based on the adolescence of L.M. Delicacy and depth - in land- and seascape, in feeling and historical verity - make this exceptional, a tribute to Cape Breton miners and indeed, to mining families everywhere. A sheer, blowing curtain sunshine moving across a floor the vivacious, eye-squinting glint of sunlit sea - all of this intensifies images of the cramped, weighty dark in which the boy’s father labours underground, undersea. The emotional nuance in Schwartz’s restrained, poetic text gets full play in the extraordinary evocation of light and deep darkness in Smith’s art. But while the boy lives out his day in the sparkling, expansive light of the summer sea, his mind turns to what’s beneath it: his father, mining for coal, just as men in his family have done for generations. “From my house, I can see the sea,” says a boy who then describes his typical summer’s day - breakfast, play, errands, and his father’s arrival home from work. Only rarely in a picture book do words and art interact as potently and intimately as they do in this luminous collaboration.

By Joanne Schwartz, illustrated by Sydney Smith

Town Is by the Sea by Joanne Schwartz