In What Isabella Wanted, Sibert Medalist Candace Fleming (Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera) boldly succeeds in creating another winning nonfiction picture book, and Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell (Wolf in the Snow) handsomely illustrates this paean to one woman's idiosyncratic passions.
"Brash, extravagant Isabella" was an affront to staid Bostonians. She "strolled zoo lions up Beacon Street, and outraged all society." This was "exactly as Isabella wanted." Fleming's lively text portrays a person who did as she pleased, bought the art she wanted and built a magnificent home for her collections. In 1903, she opened her home museum to the public 20 days a year; after her death, she gave the house to Boston. Then, in 1990, there was a robbery of 13 pieces of art that have never been recovered. Two of Isabella's favorites, Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, were among the paintings stolen. Their empty frames still sit on the walls, as shown at the beginning and end of the book, providing a strong dramatic arc to this picture of a singular woman.
This stellar team presents a woman who collects art, first in person, and then through agents she sometimes instructed to use nefarious means. (The excellent backmatter candidly states, "We would call Isabella a thief.") Cordell's broken black ink line and watercolor illustrations are energetic as they offer impressions of Isabella's collected works and the woman herself in many different poses: dramatic in the black dress in which she was painted by John Singer Sargent; humorous as she climbs the walls of her Italian palazzo. Perfect as a group read-aloud or for individual children to enjoy. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer