ONE DAY A MAYFLY

Mayfly’s life shows that it’s not the days in one’s life that matter, but the life in one’s days.

While Marr’s main text focuses on the titular creature’s brief, single-day existence, Speechley’s accompanying illustrations depict a brown-skinned youngster who sees the insect while walking through a city with a pair of elders (presumably grandparents). As the mayfly zips about, the child follows, with text on buildings and signs offering layers of meaning. Though cartoonish, the sepia-toned illustrations are meticulously detailed, integrating seamlessly with the spare text. The child observes the mayfly’s brief life cycle as words and pictures combine to show how the youngster symbolically moves through the stages of life, too. “Life is a map with no set destination,” an unseen narrator tells us as the child follows the mayfly past a day care, a primary school, a high school, and a university. Later spreads similarly highlight career options, the joy of travel and the arts, and representations of birth (a hospital maternity ward) and death (a funeral procession outside a church). Endpapers designed as calendar pages provide further context for the child’s story, as do framing scenes with a frog who first attempts to discourage the mayfly (“The world out there will eat you up…Not that it matters. You’ll only live for one day anyway”) and then is surprised at her triumphant return after “a perfect day.”

A tale to have readers seizing the day.