Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 02/01/2024 Raschka delivers a poignant yet uplifting meditation here on how quickly beauty blooms and passes. His subject is that famously short-lived flower, the daylily, which, as the first panel shows, blooms with the sun and closes with the moon. Raschka takes a week’s worth of gaily colored daylilies, stating day by day whom they bloom for, starting with Monday’s lily, which blooms for the baby. The tone is melancholy at first, moving from “Poor lily. Gone so soon” to “We are all like lilies.” The uplift comes with the realization that lilies live on in memory, as do friends, and that we can all bloom for others while we’re here. The watercolor art provides gorgeous showcases for the daylilies and is filled with appealing drawings of a cat and kitten, a duck, a tortoise, rabbits, and dragonflies, all of which “come and go,” rendered graphically by showing the creatures facing us and then turned away from us. The text, consisting of simple, cursive-like letters, is spare, creating the effect of stanzas in a poem. Moving. - Copyright 2024 Booklist.