Do Not Touch by Prudence Shen
My rating: 5/5 cats
It’s never less of a shock to stumble out of the basilica quiet of the museum into a field, a snowscape, the edge of the crashing sea—a crowd, heaving at a circus in 1890s France.
this story surprised me. a lot. it’s not the kind of thing i ordinarily dig – lighthearted adventure/romance with portals and time travel and a kid and, you know, art, but the way it’s written charmed me pretty hard. i don’t know if i have ever had the occasion to use this word before now, but it is utterly winsome.
prudence shen seems to write mostly in the graphic novel medium, which makes a lot of sense. she has a dynamic narrative style with an emphasis on imagery which -yes – is not a skill she would necessarily have had to develop in her career, as any visual accompaniment would be handled by the illustrator, but it does correspond to a sequential arts sensibility – someone accustomed to thinking about storytelling in both linguistic and pictorial modes means that description and movement are going to be valued or emphasized even when there aren’t any actual pictures attached.
this story is just a fun fantasy-explanation about why you’re not supposed to touch the paintings at art museums.
Weird stuff gets recorded in the paint.
Lars, who’d handled this crap before he’d scammed Lane into taking the job, said nobody knew why or what caused some paintings to go from innocuous to eating little kids who didn’t know how to follow museum directions. Sometimes buried in the provenance of the pieces there’s a footnote that warns of a history of shenanigans, but just as often paintings develop the nasty habit spontaneously.
if art ever tried to eat me, i’d probably like museums more. and i mean that in the most family-friendly way possible. i don’t know much about art, but the idea of leaping into a painting and wandering around is pretty appealing. although there are some exceptions:
if you’re going to get sucked into a painting, the surrealists and the weird medieval stuff are the worst.
noted.
lane and eugenie work for the museum, where their job is to rescue people who have disobeyed the VERY CLEAR ’do not touch’ signs and been unwittingly sucked into the paintings. and today, a twelve-year-old boy has managed to get himself stuck in seurat’s Le Cirque.
it is far from their first trip into this particular painting, but this time, there is an added complication resulting in hijinks, humor, champagne and burlesque.
it’s just… fun. there’s a little art history, some flirtatious banter between our heroes, and a mischievous kid who is surprisingly untedious.
it’s charm for days, and it warmed me to my usually charm-averse core.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2013/04/23/do-not-…
