A Home Again

by Colleen Rowan Kosinski, Valeria Docampo (Illustrator)

Overview

After the last brick is laid, a family moves into a brand-new house. As the family grows, the house delights in the sound of laughter echoing in its halls and the pitter-patter of little feet traversing its floors and realizes it is no longer just a house. It has become a home—their home. One day, the family packs up, and with tears in their eyes, they say goodbye. The house doesn’t know if it can ever be happy again until two men appear. It begins to feel a sliver of hope about this new family…perhaps it can become a home once more.

Told from the perspective of a house, this story’s heartfelt text and beautiful illustrations convey a warmth of feeling as two families change and grow at different times within the same four walls.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781542007207
Publisher:	Two Lions
Publication date:	11/01/2021
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	AD560L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 7 Years

About the Author

Colleen Rowan Kosinski is the author-illustrator of Lilla’s Sunflowers and A Promise Stitched in Time. She received her BA from Rutgers University in visual art, is an alumna of Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art, and spent many years as a successful freelance fine artist. Colleen calls New Jersey her home and resides there with her family. Learn more at www.colleenrowankosinski.com.

Valeria Docampo has a background in fine arts and has also been a teacher. She is the illustrator of many books for publishers around the world, including La Grande Fabrique de Mots, which has been translated into thirty languages. Originally from Argentina, she now makes her home in France with her family. Learn more at www.valeriadocampo.com.

Editorial Reviews

The expert use of light and dark creates beautiful, emotional contrasts of warmth and isolation—a wonderful match of both verbal and visual tone…Heartfelt and filled with possible connections for families.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Sleekly rendered acrylic and colored pencil art…casts the house’s interior in rich chiaroscuro…in this familiar narrative of being left behind and learning to love again.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2021-08-11
A house loses its inhabitants and longs to be loved again.

Bricks laid and timbers trembling, a newly built house eagerly awaits its first residents: a White family of four (soon to be five) with pets. From the “pitter-patter of a baby’s tiny feet” to the “sweet scent of bread baking,” the house delights in being used and loved year after year. The house revels in the “bustle of activity” as its residents grow up and age until, one day, the family moves away. Confused and hurt, the house keeps prospective buyers away by shaking its roof shingles and creaking its front steps. Finally realizing the family will never return, the house eventually opens its doors—and heart—to an interracial gay couple. The pair not only renovates the place, but starts their own family in its walls. Though comparisons to Virginia Lee Burton’s classic The Little House (1942) are inevitable, Kosinski’s text gives this house a chance to speak for itself. The contemplative narrative voice achieves the delicate balance of being sentimental without becoming maudlin. Docampo’s colorful double-page spreads delightfully extend the text with small details. Her stylized human figures, small against the grandeur of the house’s rooms and furniture, can be difficult to make out. Yet the expert use of light and dark creates beautiful, emotional contrasts of warmth and isolation—a wonderful match of both verbal and visual tone.

Heartfelt and filled with possible connections for families. (Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Reviews