In a Jar is a must. It is just beautiful through and through.
Llewellyn places objects in jars from places and moments he’s been. Later, when he opens them, he is transported…or rather, it is transported to him. The leaves falling in the white woods are suddenly falling about him as he sits in his room upon his bed.
Marcero moves from capturing objects into jars to moments into jar.
The “tart charry syrup” tinted waters at sunset are placed in jars, and Llewellyn gifts one to Evelyn whom he meets here. “And to her surprise, it glowed through the night with the memory of that sunset.”
If a memory can travel/stay with you across time, why not distance? It’s not a thought the two friends will even contemplate as they spend season capturing memories in jars. Marcero will frame scenes in jars, wordless occasions. The frames artfully arranged. She’ll sequence the meaning behind jars, the moments fairly simple, but beautifully rendered, colors deep, textured. You begin to wonder at the story behind the jars in the collection on Llewellyn’s walls.
Their collection is marvelous. The different shaped jars. The imagination/conversation it inspires.
Then Evelyn must move away. The emptiness, colorless expanse of that page following Evelyn’s departure. The line/shape in the jar echoing the ones in her speech bubble (tears/sadness) and on Llewellyn’s back as they say goodbye.
But the world is full of wonder the next pages seem to say. And it is the thought of Evelyn that moves Llewellyn from the blank black walls of his room, from the window looking out on that incredible night sky to collecting a meteor shower in a jar.
Marcero renders a new sequence of four panels, one that carries a gift from one friend to another. Here they’ll begin a new tradition of collecting and sharing jars. I love what Evelyn chooses to collect, but even lovelier is how they’re rendered on the facing page. Marcero imagination on the page is such a delight, the “bright night lights” so perfectly distributed, little squares/windows, the crowds trailing…the sounds in words, lines, shapes, bubbles, notations, their collective color red.
We learn that with finding Evelyn and then her leaving did not expand then contract Llewelyn’s world. His world only expands once again, and then again. They begin to correspond. And as he enters the autumn woods to collect leaves for Evelyn, he meets Max “Luckily, Llewellyn had brought an extra jar.”
In a Jar will be an obvious choice for a Moving book, but it’s much, much more. The objects in the jar would be mere objects if not for the memory they recall. The collection was lovely but ordinary before Llewelyn found Evelyn. Their relationship made what went into the jar all the more marvelous, extraordinary. In a Jar is very much a friendship book in a present tense; a book about memories that is about the making of them. It’s an active book, creating the memories, collecting the moments, sharing, gifting them--not a passive visitation of jars long made. It inspires not only the imagination of what would I collect, but with whom might I collect, or share, or gift?
Llewelyn seeks the beauty around him, as does Evelyn. Their relationship generates even more creative spark, each a companion in their pursuits to notice and take pleasure in “the wind just before snow falls,” or “shadows of summer.”
I’m curious what image/object would be collected in a jar had Llewelyn and Evelyn read Marcero’s In a Jar, because surely it is a pleasure, it is certainly memorable, something worth treasuring and revisiting.