Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 10/01/2025 *Starred Review* In an experiment profound in both premise and execution (as well as profoundly silly), Caldecott Honor artist McCarty unleashes a genre-bending “graphic poem.” Pages with ample white space present wordless images etched with dense Gorey-esque textured linework, interspersed with rectangles packed with hand-lettered swirls of words and numbers, through which an emerging universe evolves into an odyssey of truly epic proportions. Five erudite, spiky-furred wolves are at sea on a Viking ship, in pursuit of making art. Their wild encounters—debating with an enormous fish over its portrait, being attacked by taunting feline rivals, adopting an enigmatic “animal,” a rescue by cave-painting bunnies, weathering a dragon’s fiery mural critique, battling the dread Flying Yorbas—veer between slapstick absurdity and deep philosophical inquiry about the nature of art. Though concluding battles bring some weapon-wielding mayhem, the violence is tempered via the Bosch-like carnival of strangeness. While the phrases are packed in dense patterns with numbers and small drawings, their relative sizes suggest an order of importance: the biggest conveys a narrative, of sorts, with embellishing comic asides on a whirl of smaller font. With echoes of Sendak, Selznick, Shaun Tan, even Monty Python, this gloriously absurdist tale is still unmistakably McCarty’s own. Offering a profound reward to readers willing to lose themselves in its eccentric rhythms, sly humor, and surreal moments, this marvel is a challenging, provocative, and unforgettable meditation on art-making and imagination itself. - Copyright 2025 Booklist.