IN EVERY LIFE

“And in every life, / blessed is the love.”

Frazee’s author’s note explains that she was inspired to write this text when she “heard a call-and-response version of a Jewish baby-naming blessing and immediately felt its potential as a picture book.” After several false starts, she began working on it in 2020, “when so many things about our world were upended,” and the following year, her first grandchild was born. In its inclusive, warmhearted celebration of community, family, and life itself, the resulting book feels like a melding of earlier titles Frazee illustrated: Everywhere Babies (2001) by Susan Meyers and All the World (2009) by Liz Garton Scanlon. While the realistic art style is akin to that of those books, the text is sparer, with pacing grounded in the call-and-response inspiration: “In every birth,” reads the opening verso, with the resolution on the facing page reading, “blessed is the wonder.” Accompanying vignettes of babies cared for by young and old people alike invite readers to speculate about relationships and to delight in the loving, diverse depictions. Then the page turn reveals a full-bleed vista of a couple with a baby looking at the sunrise, pink clouds filling the sky. Once established, this pattern—of a call-and-response spread illustrated with vignettes followed by a wordless full-bleed spread of a single family in nature—carries through the entire book, providing opportunities for observation, conversation, and reflection. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

This lyrical blessing of a picture book belongs on every shelf.