Book Brings Home the Idea of Home
Book Brings Home the Idea of Home Image courtesy of iosphere / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
As agents keep their eye out for closing gifts that will be relevant and memorable, a new book that kids can enjoy with their parents may help plant some long-growing seeds about the value of home.
Carson Ellis’s new Home, according to a review on literary site BrainPickings.org, “presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home.”
The homes Ellis depicts in lavish, colorful illustrations range from the realistic — she shows herself illustrating her half-finished book in her own home — through the fictional but familiar, including the shoe lived in by the fairytale “old lady,” and finally to fanciful abodes, including a home on the moon and the home of a Norse god.
Other characters who appear with their unique homes include a Slovakian duchess, a Kenyan blacksmith, and a babushka. Ellis even illustrates animals’ homes to show how universal the idea is: Even bees and field mice have homes.
However different and unusual the home may be, concludes reviewer Maria Popova, “only from that place of safety can we reach out to connect, to understand one another, and to begin belonging together.”
Source: “An Illustrated Celebration of the Many Things Home Can Mean,” BrainPickings.org (March 9, 2015)
