Review by New York Times Review
MARGARET WISE BROWN firmly believed that home is where the heart is. For nearly 70 years, her classic bedtime story "Goodnight Moon" has lulled children to sleep with a picture of the warm comforts of home. But if the book is disarmingly heartfelt, it is also undeniably strange. It is set in a mysterious "great green room" where, page by page, the light grows more weirdly crepuscular. The room's curious props include a comb, a brush and a bowl full of mush. Its most memorable line, "Goodnight nobody," could have been written by Samuel Beckett. It is a brilliant children's book, but its brilliance lies in its dreamlike oddity. Like a good witch, Brown weaves a kindly spell, and children succumb. Three new picture books appear to be carrying on Brown's particular brand of hearth-centricity: They swaddle children in the comforts of home, and they are filled with captivating quirks. But at the same time, these books amply demonstrate how much things have changed. In their different ways, the authors use the notion of home for purposes that shoot far beyond Brown's bewitching, sleep-inducing agenda. "A Fine Dessert" is written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. Its subtitle announces, "Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat," which pretty much covers the ambitious narrative of the book. We see a creamy dessert called blackberry fool being prepared four times, in the early 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The settings are four households in the English town of Lyme, in Charleston, S.C., in Boston and in San Diego. The cooks are four teams of two, each pairing a parent and a child. In each of the kitchen scenes, the preparation of the dessert is repeated, but with many variations, paying strict attention to historical accuracy. The cream for the dessert arrives via cow, wagon, milkman and supermarket. It is whipped with a bundle of twigs, a metal whisk, a rotary beater and an electric mixer. Through four centuries, we even track the history of refrigeration. Jenkins and Blackall show changes in family dynamics and social mores as well. In a bold and somewhat unsettling choice, they portray a smiling slave woman and her daughter in 1810 Charleston, preparing dessert for the happy, well-fed family of a Southern plantation owner. After the family eats dinner, mother and child huddle in a closet, licking the bowl. Inevitably, the book's theme-and-variations device is a little repetitive and, for a child, rather academic (the fast two pages are devoted to exhaustive historical notes from both writer and illustrator, complete with bibliography). But "A Fine Dessert" has its abundant charms and, with the guidance of a helpful reader, it can serve to nurture a child's budding interest in social history. Even better, the book teaches parents and children how to fix blackberry fool, making the project sound easy and fun and making your mouth water when you hear it read out loud. The title of Carson Ellis's delightful book proclaims its subject: It's called simply "Home." The cover art shows a grid of 21 small images of domiciles, resembling the icons on a computer desktop. Inside, we see different kinds of homes, each accompanied by a bald, declarative sentence (several of the sentences begin with the words "This is the home of...."). The homes are depicted in Ellis's droll illustrations, rendered in muted colors and a faux-naïf style that suggests a younger, hipper Grandma Moses. With the turn of every page, the definition of "home" broadens. We jump from a country house to a city apartment, from a wigwam to a palace, and before you know it, we are in the Old Woman's Shoe, of nursery rhyme fame. By the end we have visited a beehive, a raccoon's nest, a condo on the surface of the moon and the tour bus of a rock band. The band, incidentally, is clearly the Decemberists, the Portland, Ore.-based group whose lead singer is Ellis's husband, Colin Meloy. The text below the picture coyly identifies the folk-rock troupe: "Some folks live on the road." We see the tour bus parked outside a theater, surrounded by band members toting their equipment. Ellis portrays herself smiling and waving from the bus window. Toward the end of the book she reappears in her artist's studio, and in the fast spread there she is again in the window of her own cottage in the country. The text simply states, "This is my home, and this is me." You would think that Ellis's self-referential in-jokes might be annoyingly narcissistic, bypassing the kids to amuse the grown-ups. Instead, her sly humor and irreverent spirit only endear her to kids and grown-ups alike. "YOU NEST HERE WITH ME" is a charmer written by the mother-and-daughter team Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple. The authors have chosen a bird's nest to suggest a child's comfy bedroom and have extended the metaphor over 30 pages: "Like baby bird, your nest can be/Anywhere there's you and me," they announce. In a lovely image by the illustrator Melissa Sweet, the cover shows a young girl fast asleep under a bright red blanket. In the foreground is a nest of sleeping chicks with their watchful mother perched above them. If you read the book from start to finish, you can easily imagine a child fast asleep by the last page. But as with the other two, this book has more on its mind than simply lulling. A mom reads to her daughter at bedtime from a copy of the book itself. The two look out the window at a family of pigeons on a ledge. On the next page a catbird tends her eggs. Next is a nest of wrens. Then come grackles, coots, plovers and so on. This book, you see, is a lullaby in the guise of a child's ornithology primer. To introduce the various bird species, Yolen and Stemple have written delicate rhyming stanzas, each ending with that soothing title phrase, "You nest here with me." Sweet's fine watercolors are gently playful and zoologically accurate. The book's three creators share a consuming interest in birds (just look at the bird catalog on the last two pages). They've come up with a bedtime book warmed by the comforts of home. But it also does the best possible job of encouraging children to become bird-watchers for life. JOHN LITHGOW, the actor and musician, is the author of nine children's picture books, most recently, "Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 15, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Home. The word conjures up images of place and pokes at memory. In this arrestingly illustrated book, Ellis presents many types of home, some as contemporary and concrete as a brick apartment building slashed with graffiti, others as fanciful as a shoe covered with cavorting children supervised by a dispirited old woman. The minimal text consists of short identifications of the dwellings: Some are palaces. Or underground lairs. Not every home dweller is human. The interior-to-exterior view of a raccoon's home inside a tree is especially striking. Ellis, in her picture-book debut, draws with simplicity and precision, yet there are often so many fanciful details that second and third looks will come naturally. The oversize buff-colored pages are just the right background for the gouache-and-ink paintings done in a subdued palette and splashed with reds. The whole effect makes the pictures seem like frameable art. This will encourage children to muse on their homes and the homes of others and dream about living one day in a palace or perhaps a shoe.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ellis's quiet, folk-naif exploration of the idea of "home" may invite comparison to Hoberman's A House Is a House for Me, but hers is a different journey. She starts in the real world-"Home is a house in the country. Or home is an apartment"-but drifts into memory and fantasy. A long-ago schoolbook might have been the source for the explorer's ship greeted by Native Americans: "Some homes are boats. Some homes are wigwams." Storybook scenes abound-a Mughal palace, a thieves' lair, a sunken Atlantian ruin. A tiny Russian kitchen crowded with dishes bears the legend, "A babushka lives here." On the facing page is a living room with craters and a familiar-looking planet out the window: "A Moonian lives here." The final pages show Ellis (Stagecoach Sal) in her studio, at work on the painting that opens the book. "An artist lives here," she writes, revealing a secret. "This is my home, and this is me." It's a work that confers classic gifts: time to look and time to wonder. "Where is your home?" she asks. "Where are you?" Ages 4-8. Agent: Steven Malk, Writers House. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-The realistic, fanciful, and stereotypical merge in this picture book homage to the place we call home. Gouache-and-ink art featuring warm, earthy colors with splashes or spots of red illustrate the hand-lettered, simple text ("Home is a house in the country. Or home is an apartment." and later, "Sea homes. Bee homes. Hollow tree homes."). Familiar and unfamiliar (Kenya) and sometimes magical (Atlantis) settings inhabited by humans, animals, and mythical beings are included. The illustrations offer much to pore over and connections to be made. The dove that appears on the title page can be found throughout the book and the silhouette in an upstairs window of the house that appears on the first spread, reveals itself to be the hat of a girl on the final pages. The penultimate scene is that of an artist in her home surrounded by items familiar to readers (a weathervane, figure of a house, a ship in a bottle and a globe, and a piece of black-and-white fabric, and a pointed cap). These objects will give observant children pause and send them back to page one to see what other details and images are carried throughout the story. However, the Mideastern lair, the Japanese businessman's geometric home, a wigwam, and a pagoda, may give others pause for different reasons. VERDICT While skillfully rendered and artistically pleasing, this eclectic assortment of domiciles is hardly representational and is less than ideal for classroom usage.-Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
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. sarah ellis (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ellis, known for her illustrations for Colin Meloy's Wildwood series, here riffs on the concept of "home."Shifting among homes mundane and speculative, contemporary and not, Ellis begins and ends with views of her own home and a peek into her studio. She highlights palaces and mansions, but she also takes readers to animal homes and a certain famously folkloric shoe (whose iconic Old Woman manages a passel of multiethnic kids absorbed in daring games). One spread showcases "some folks" who "live on the road"; a band unloads its tour bus in front of a theater marquee. Ellis' compelling ink and gouache paintings, in a palette of blue-grays, sepia and brick red, depict scenes ranging from mythical, underwater Atlantis to a distant moonscape. Another spread, depicting a garden and large building under connected, transparent domes, invites readers to wonder: "Who in the world lives here? / And why?" (Earth is seen as a distant blue marble.) Some of Ellis' chosen depictions, oddly juxtaposed and stripped of any historical or cultural context due to the stylized design and spare text, become stereotypical. "Some homes are boats. / Some homes are wigwams." A sailing ship's crew seems poised to land near a trio of men clad in breechclothsotherwise unidentified and unremarked upon. Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions. (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
