Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 04/01/2021 *Starred Review* There are many fascinating museums in the world, but expand your definition of what you might hope to see in a single building and enter the Museum of Everything. An ungendered white child imagines what could be included in a museum of favorite things or of things that fill them with wonder. Gloriously inventive illustrations reflect the child’s rich inner thoughts. One imagined room houses an array of bushes, made of flowers, leaves, and twigs. Wouldn’t they make wonderful skirts? In this inclusive museum, everyone is welcome to try on the skirts and twirl. Later, a Sky Museum is depicted as a giant book, with clouds and colors that shift as the pages turn. Materials are chosen to best convey the visual message, so watercolor is combined with sand, stones, wood, moss, wool, foam-core board, fabric, embroidery thread, modeling clay. Some pages are photographed 3-D models, producing the look of a dollhouse or bitmoji room; other spreads are painted more traditionally. The result is a marvel of creativity, engaging children in thinking about whether they would have a Museum of Small Things or a Museum of Hiding Places or perhaps museums of shadows or islands? Whatever causes you to pause, appreciate, contemplate, and enjoy—that’s what belongs in your own Museum of Everything. - Copyright 2021 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 05/01/2021 PreS-Gr 3—Perkins, who broke readers' hearts with Home Lovely, and with every book since, elevates the ordinary—again—in this story about objects we simply do not really see: a fallen leaf, a cloud, a flower. In the mental meanderings of the narrator, who is white, nongendered, and lyrically minded, "I wonder about things like, can a rock in a puddle be an island? And think about if the rock in the puddle is on a boulder in a pond. And what if that pond is on a small island in a lake? And what if that lake is on a bigger island, out in the ocean? It would be an island in a pond on an island in a pond on an island in a pond on an island in a pond." This child, in T-shirt and jeans, gives readers a sense that the microscopic and the telescoped can live side by side, or within one another. It's the kind of philosophical questioning that in less capable hands would be pretentious, but Perkins brings a sense of scale to the drawings—part watercolors, part digital, some photographed overlays like ghosts from an I Spy book—and creates a seamless whole. There will be, in the Museum of Everything, a Museum of Islands, as well as a Museum of Hiding Places, shown as a bush, with figures in it lightly penciled in white. The wanderings have force and direction, as the book winds down to what-ifs—What if we are in a Museum of Hiding Places right now?—given weight in dollhouse vignettes that shimmer from tactile to ephemeral. VERDICT Perkins connects with readers who daydream, validating that act as a way to see the world and learn of its many interlocking pieces, and makes imaginative mental musings into a story, and an artform. Pure fun.—Kimberly Olson Fakih, School Library Journal - Copyright 2021 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.