To Everything There Is a Season

With sunny watercolors created in a delicate, almost-miniature scale, Daly interprets the familiar words of Ecclesiastes. A small farm by the sea provides an evocative setting for the life cycles of the natural world and of a family. As the simple text reads "A time to be born," a pregnant woman rests outside the farmhouse while the patriarch works on his fishing net and their daughter plays with a doll. Above the words "and a time to die," readers see only the boots of an old-woman neighbor (observed previously tending her cow), outside of her darkened, shuttered hut. As time passes and seasons change, so does the family change and grow with its surroundings. All the while, readers are whisked away to what is presumably the artist's native South Africa via the soothing and enormously appealing illustrations. A final page spotlights the full Biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. All ages. (Feb.)