Many Points of Me by Caroline Gertler (review)

Gertler, Caroline Many Points of Me. Greenwillow, 2021 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063027008 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063027022 $8.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 5-7

It's been over a year since Georgia's famous artist father died, but she still desperately misses him, to the point where she's struggling with her own art, despite the big citywide contest she's expected to enter. The eleven-year-old is also irritated with long-term best friend and apartment neighbor Theo, whose special relationship with Georgia's father is a source of jealousy, and who can't seem to allow Georgia to be changed by her father's death. Then she spots possible clues in her father's sketches and paintings that he was planning to paint a big new work about her, and she's determined to put the pieces together, wow the art world, and prove her specialness to her father. Georgia's turmoil is credible, and Gertler sympathetically tracks her protagonist's understandable conflict with the art that links her to her father. The new-friendship subplot fizzles, though, and the book seems unaware of how self-focused Theo often is, making Georgia's new sympathy for his sorrow one more valorization of the primacy of his feelings over hers. The blend of art and mystery in Manhattan, however, will still likely appeal to lovers of Tucker's All the Greys on Greene Street (BCCB 6/19).