Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 08/01/2019 This joins the corpus of recent publications about war’s traumatizing effect on children. Here we meet Idriss, who lives—judging by the illustrations—in an African village. As the title implies, he has just one precious marble, and readers are invited to empathize with the delight he finds in playing with it. When violence threatens his village, Idriss and his mother flee, and the story shifts focus to let us see their resilience and hope in the face of their precarious lives. Whereas the narrative is tender and lyrical, Zaü’s illustrations offer a striking contrast. Washes of watercolor in ochre and rose capture the bright desert heat while figures, shadows, and movement are rendered in sweeps of solid black ink. The intention, as with the marble itself, is to emphasize the simultaneous fragility and solidity of childhood, life, and the places we think of as home. Poignant, beautiful, and timely, this can be paired thematically with Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s Adrift at Sea (2016) and Wendy Meddour’s Lubna and Pebble (2019). - Copyright 2019 Booklist.