Home
by Carson Ellis; illus by the author
Preschool, Primary   Candlewick   40 pp.
2/15   978-0-7636-6529-6   g

Ellis presents a dreamy, painterly meditation on the diversity and range of dwellings around the world and across time and imagination. “Home is a house in the country,” the text begins, and the illustration shows a simple-looking house with the childlike basics of door, two windows, and a chimney. With a page turn, the setting shifts to the city, all brick and graffiti, with a highlighted apartment housing a cat and a girl befriending a bird on the ledge. We move back in history to a multi-masted galleon (“Some homes are boats”) and a village of wigwams, then to the fanciful (the Old Woman’s shoe-house, the undersea homes of “Atlantians”), then back to the concrete here-and-now: “This is the home of a Kenyan blacksmith.” Certain motifs dance in and out of the pictures — doves, chimney pots, red stripes, horses — and in the end we come full circle, to that house in the country and the artist’s studio in that house, full of the objects we have just seen combined and recombined. The text encourages the reader to participate (“But whose home is this? And what about this?”), and the cover illustration further extends the options of where we can live. All the choices are warmly inviting.

From the January/February 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.