Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 08/01/2025 *Starred Review* The subtitle of Mushin’s Ultrawild says it’s “audacious,” but that may be underselling it. The opening premise is to design what it would take to rewild every city on Earth—into a jungle, a forest, a savannah, whatever it was prior to industrialization—and to imagine what kinds of technologies would help make such a transformation possible. These ideas include everything from trillions of 3D-printed solar-reflective birds (frightening!) to eliminating single-driver cars in favor of autonomous ridesharing and other forms of transit (likely!) to the compost-firing cannons that replace the loss of megafauna (gross!). Each chapter builds on those previous, imagining (theoretically plausible) inventions most of us would never dream of to address very real problems of climate change—until we get the “one . . . small . . . problem. . .” that is the continued bad news about the environment and escalation of fossil-fuel burning across the globe. Mushin is right to include this, particularly because his response to it throughout the remainder of the book reminds us that hope is active and action-oriented, not a passive state of being. Each page is filled to the brim with meticulously drawn cityscapes, mechanical designs, animals of all shapes and sizes, and lengthy text explanations. Overwhelming—the way the climate crisis feels—yet approachable and empowering in equal measure, Ultrawild is a brilliantly designed comic that will have wide appeal beyond its target audience, even among adults. - Copyright 2025 Booklist.