TEARS

Meditations about crying.

“Sometimes, when our hearts hurt, our eyes fill up and we cry,” opens the text, thankfully segueing quickly to a less-cloying register. Much of Delacroix’s piece is straightforward and affirming, explaining who cries—“Everyone cries. Little kids. Big kids. / Once in a while, grownups cry”—and why: “Crying cleans our messy feelings,” and after doing it, “we feel lighter, ready for new adventures.” One page undermines this acceptance: Across from a child portraying the “times we keep [tears] to ourselves” (face buried in arms) is a child portraying the times “we want our tears to be seen” with a dramatic hand gesture, a theater spotlight, and curtains evoking a stage. Readers shy about crying may shrink away if they think their weeping could be seen as a theatrical performance. Cryptic details pop up: “Crocodiles, with their thick, scaly skin, cry too”—but the young audience will likely have no context for crocodile tears, either metaphoric or biological; “sometimes even trees weep”—but is that an unspoken weeping-willow pun, a reference to transpiration, or something deeper? Art combines teardrop patterns with a photorealistic drawing style, mostly black-and-white, featuring shading and big-eyed close-ups of the two White-presenting children who are featured. Cleverly, tears threatening “to wash everything away” form an ocean; a rising hot air balloon drops a ballast bag of tears; and one child’s tears form a park fountain.

Inconsistent, but an evergreen topic.