Alessandra Sanguinetti’s Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, the second installment of The Adventures of Guille and Belinda series, feels like dusk in late August, your shadow stretching long behind you while the glow of golden hour illuminates the things you’ll miss most about the waning summer. It’s at once longingly reminiscent of a buoyant yet distant past, and gracefully accepting of time’s inevitable forward march. This latest volume follows up, seventeen years later, on The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, which recounts the saccharine childhood of two young Argentinian cousins, Guille and Belinda, whom Sanguinetti first began photographing when the girls were ten and nine years old. Now, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer chronicles the two young girls as they traverse adolescence into adulthood and eventually motherhood, all while maintaining and deepening the female intimacy that has long characterized their evolving relationship.

The book opens with scenes from the cusp of pubescence: Guille and Belinda lounge in bunk beds and playfully adorn themselves in homemade costumes of tinsel and dried flowers. Soaring expanses of baby blue sky marked by the gentle pastel of a rainbow over never-ending rural horizons create a timeless utopian canvas upon which Sanguinetti is able to reveal the girls’ uncovering of and growth into their own distinct personalities. And the complexities of the relationships at play—that between Guille and Belinda, as well as that between the two girls and Sanguinetti herself—disclose themselves as the book unfolds, layering the images with a rich familiarity that can only be captured through years of closeness.

But somewhere amidst the glimmer of their youth is an exponentially permeating sense of weight and responsibility. Soaked swimming suits are traded for high heels and modest, floor length skirts; and the frivolity of daily activities morphs into the monotony of domestic chores. But this tightening of the girls’ tether to reality is less of a downfall than it is a transition—from unconditional familial love to the sweet blossom of romantic love; a ripening from the joy of fantasy to the satisfaction of maturity.

Sanguinetti’s mastery of motif brings attention to themes of life’s cyclical nature and the fleetingness of the present. The book is presented chronologically, but the reader is led gently through growth, change, birth, and death all at once. The inescapable tick of the clock is evident not only in the development of Guille and Belinda, but also through Sanguinetti’s interjections into their story with depictions of the circle of life on the farm. In one image, Belinda stands, knife in hand, pink shirt stretched taut over her pregnant belly, gazing wearily through the lens. On the next page, a cat sneaks behind a pair of chicken’s feet jutting out from a red bucket; the chicken’s severed head rests alarmingly on the gatepost as a reminder of the transience of our own lives.

Capturing the present is like trying to scoop up water with a slotted spoon, and Sanguinetti does so masterfully. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is a sweet, poignant sequel that reflects lovingly on what was, and eagerly anticipates what is still to come.