6/28/2023 0 Comments Ida, Always by Caron LevisGus’ distress is emphasized in large, bold type: “ ‘Don’t go,’ he growled. The book is very blunt about what’s happening: “one day, when her body stopped working, Ida would die.” Levis writes about death and the bears’ mutual devotion with surprising beauty: “There were growling days and laughing days / and days that mixed them up.” But some of the most affecting passages are hardly poetic at all. Some days, Ida is too weak to swim or play, and sometimes she coughs or sleeps too long. This is apt, as the main characters in the book are Gus and Ida, two polar bears living in the city zoo. They’re city skies, so the clouds are shaped like buses and taxis, but sometimes they look like bears chasing each other through the air. When the sky isn’t visible, it’s usually reflected in a pool of water. There’s a spectacular view of the sky on almost every page of the story. This is a picture book about loss and grief, so it is probably not a coincidence that it is pictorially dominated by skies.
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