Review by Booklist Review
A self-described radio junkie, New York artist Engler began painting a small watercolor depicting each day's headlines in November 2015, a daily practice that intensified during the chaos of the Trump presidency. Then, in January 2020, as Engler writes in her introduction, "The plague entered my drawings quietly." Soon COVID-19 dominates. Engler pairs vibrant images with handwritten text in the dynamic paintings that fill this complexly engrossing visual plague diary. Some juxtapose news stories, to startling effect, in panels like a graphic novel. Others are more painterly. Engler adeptly shifts point-of-view and scale, and expressive portraits abound. As COVID-19 and politically motivated lies spread in a double contagion, Engler's paintings grow more urgent, swirling like storms. She then reclaims structure, introducing chilling skull-and-crossbones and masks-and-virus motifs. Flames enter her visual lexicon as protests flare over George Floyd's police murder. Cultural news offers welcome respite. Engler's unique and moving chronicle-in-paintings captures, with a global perspective, the year's fears and sorrows, outrages and struggles, encapsulating a profound amount of information, reminding us of how crucial journalism is and affirming life's intricate interconnections.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Artist Engler debuts with a stunning visual chronicle of what many consider "the worst year of our lives." From January 20, 2020, to January 21, 2021, Engler created a work of art for each day of the calamitous period marked by Covid-19, based on the headlines every morning. These evocative works, accompanied by brief notes summarizing the day's news, lead readers through the monumental, mundane, and transitory events of what Engler calls "a time scarred by fecklessness, devastation, rage, injustice, illness, and death." While the pandemic looms large in her provocative paintings--as well as former president Trump's two impeachments--she underscores how, despite humanity being on pause, "we managed to carry on." On offer are portraits that juxtapose the profound with the prosaic--Kobe Bryant's death on January 27, 2020; Tom Brady's signing with Tampa Bay for $60 million (which happened, she notes, the same day that New York "declared disaster"); the murder of George Floyd in May and the subsequent summer of protest; and President Biden's inauguration. In a blunt style that captures the urgency and confusion of that year, Engler's paintings offer an extraordinarily haunting time capsule of an era readers soon won't forget. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Five years ago, visual artist Engler decided that her task each morning would be to illustrate the first bit of news she heard on her radio. Then Donald Trump was elected president, and she never stopped creating images. From COVID-19 to George Floyd's murder and the protests in response, to California wildfires and an arduous election, here is a visual diary of one very tough year. With a 40,000-copy first printing; Engler's honors include multiple grants and two MacDowell residencies.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An artist chronicles the headlines of an extraordinarily tumultuous year. As Engler explains in the introduction, she had never imagined her work would find her bearing witness to such momentous upheaval. "I painted the day's headlines," she writes, "making a picture of the first few news items I heard emitting from my wooden bedside radio when I woke up each morning." For much of her career, she writes, "my art had been about depicting the mundane or ordinary to create a big picture, working from the small and intimate to arrive at a greater whole." Yet 2020 would confound everyone's expectations, and revisiting it through Engler's vivid drawings and sharp memories is enough to give anyone whiplash. The impeachment trials and the presidential campaigning dominated the news at the beginning of 2020, with the threat of pandemic barely a whisper. Even as that threat accelerated, there were countless mixed messages in the media, as the virus spread from China across the world, with concentrated outbreaks in New York and elsewhere around the country. By the end of March, the U.S. led the world in cases. A full month later, with the country in various states of shutdown, the same news cycle showed Dr. Anthony Fauci warning of worse to come in the fall and Jared Kushner hailing the administration's containment of the virus as "a great success." The author goes on to depict the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests, Trump and other associates testing positive, and the chaotic presidential election. The book ends with Joe Biden's inauguration. Throughout, Engler combines the sharp eye of an editorial caricaturist with the vibrant color of a portraitist, and the energy of the artwork underscores the sense of urgency in the day's news. The accompanying text has a matter-of-fact tone that belies the powerful underlying sense that so much has gone seriously awry. A dynamic artistic rendering of chaos survived--at least so far. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
