Page 45 Review by Stephen
Just you wait until you see the water lilies.
Oh yes, just you wait!
It's Dad who looks to the future for his family.
He can foresee their shared joy in the nature and teeming wildlife which they will attract to their new pond once it is built, and he inspires them with his enthusiasm.
It's so very good to have a project!
There will be tadpoles, he said, and dragonflies.
Mum told him that our garden was too tiny and my brother said that ponds were gross and stinky.
Dad took no notice.
He just smiled and whispered,
Wait until you see the water lilies!
And yes, you just wait!
Dad never got his tadpoles of his dragonflies.
He died and left a muddy, messy hole that filled our garden.
Dead leaves blew in, tin cans, all sorts of rubblish.
Ugly weeds grew tall.
We all stared out at it: the muddy, messy hole that filled our hearts.
I'm sorry to do this to you yet again but, just as with the same creators' PERFECT, Nicola Davies and Cathy Fisher have something important to say - this time about bereavement - and they do so honestly and eloquently.
Kindness and communication is everything, and so often our young ones don't know where to start. And it is so very important to start, otherwise they (or we) are left lost and alone, with no one to talk to about what is a very bewildering experience, violent in its finality.
Adults find it difficult enough to talk about bereavement when they have years of experience with which to make a good go of it. We have a certain sense of context, at least. Children don't.
We all need a way of seeing through abysmal loss to some form of future that will shine the light back into our lives without feeling disloyal: something to carry us through, like a promise to ourselves and to those we still miss. We need a way to honour their memory and so carry it forward in order that they will never, ever be forgotten.
Just you wait until you see the water lilies.
So yes, just you wait! They'll be here.
As improbably as last time with PERFECT, Davies and Fisher have united to synthesise a pictorial story which openly owns to the understandable eruptions of outright anger at being left behind - at feeling betrayed - without which it would be as shallow as the first pond and so speak to no one.
Instead, this encompasses all of that, on day after disappointing day.
But also it projects forward, so that even the initially reluctant then obdurate brother sees the promise in a new spring ahead.
And. It. Is. Celebrated!
Cathy Fisher pulls no punches during the bleakest days. Those pages are dark and raw and as muddy as the hole in the ground left by Dad's absence. But they're still accompanied by the same sense of cocooning - of encircling - which forms a comforting motif throughout: there are hugs and swirling leaves, there's the looping hosepipe and the pond life framing the family and joining the siblings together when once they were at odds. Finally there's the finished oval-shaped pond itself, which forms a heart through being bisected by the book's spine and binding, as the pages rise from its centre. Which is clever.
I don't think that pond was ever going to be big enough for ducks, but ambition is a beautiful thing.
