Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois

What’s it about?

The story.

By a river in France, young Louise grows up in a family of tapestry weavers, learning from her adored mother how to draw the missing edges of old cloth and mend what is torn. She studies patterns, spiders, the way threads hold a life together. When her mother dies, Louise finds she can weave her grief and memory into art — eventually building the towering steel spiders, named Maman, that made her one of the great modern sculptors. Amy Novesky's soft, threadlike prose and Isabelle Arsenault's exquisite, fabric-toned illustrations turn a real artist's life into a tender meditation on mothers, memory and making. A quietly moving introduction to art and to the idea that we can spin sorrow into something beautiful — ideal for reading with a thoughtful older child, or alongside a first look at a real artist's work.