The Books

Sandy’s Circus: A Story About Alexander Calder

by Tanya Lee Stone
Illustrated by Boris Kulikov

One Potato Review

Inspiring and all that, still faithfully impish, like the traveling exhibition which this title describes. This is a portrait of an artist who did not recognize his vocation until he had already studied in college to be an engineer, and held jobs, during one of which (as a fireman in the boiler room of a ship), he witnessed a sunrise which begged for a brush. If this sounds scenic, it is, though Boris Kulikov, the illustrator here, does a pretty great job of disorienting us between the pictures of 1920’s Paris for example, and the pictures in Sandy’s head. The artist loses himself in his creations, and so, felicitously, do we. Wide-eyed, a little racing sometimes, without all the high-minded doom.