CHIBBARO, Julie

Aurora’s father gives her a roll of drawing paper and a cryptic message—“I’m going to save you, girl”—before burning their Staten Island commune home to the ground with himself inside. Ror, her mother, and her sister Marilyn (née Halo) escape the blaze and move to unwelcoming Manhattan, where they live in poverty and where Ror is forced to attend public high school for the first time. She’s an outsider but always an artist (“I drew because if I didn’t, I’d die”), and she finds comfort in Mr. Garci’s art class. It’s here that she meets Trey, an African American street artist in a graffiti crew that slowly welcomes Ror into its ranks. The crux of this story is the protagonist’s deep questioning of her artistic purpose: she’s torn between the liberating medium of graffiti (“I didn’t feel contained by the paper…I had enough space. I was free”) and her sketchbooks of drawings and watercolors that just may have caught a gallery’s attention. The setting is the gritty underbelly of 1980s NYC, populated by young street artists with their anti-Reagan rumblings and their love of Michael Jackson and The Ramones, Keith Haring and Basquiat. Ror’s narration is distant but with a subtle poignancy that will resonate with the right reader, while Sovak’s interspersed illustrations—from trippy drawings of skulls and eyeballs to graffiti-like words and images