From School Library Journal
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From Booklist
Gr. 6-8. Yo-Yo Ma nicknamed his favorite cello "Sweetie Pie"; Georgia O'Keeffe called her Model T Ford "Hello." Such endearing personal details are among the many facts readers will encounter in these entries in the long-running People to Know series. Although the profile of "the world's . . . most enthusiastic music explorer" certainly contains much of interest to adolescents (especially accounts of Ma's rebellious teenage years and, later, his forays into film and television), ultimately O'Keeffe proves more successful. While Chippendale seems overly concerned with documenting Ma's repertoire, Shull excels at picking out watershed moments: the school assignment to draw a jack-in-the-pulpit blossom that taught O'Keeffe to "[look] very carefully at details"; the bones shipped to New York from New Mexico in a padded barrel, destined to appear in her iconic southwestern landscapes. Both books conclude with source notes, time lines, lists of titles for further reading, and, in Ma, a discography. To supplement the book's sparse black-and-white illustrations, direct readers of O'Keeffe to related titles containing colorplates, helpfully indicated in the bibliography. Jennifer Mattson
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