Where the Heart Is: The Blue House by Phoebe Wald

Leo lived with his dad, in a old blue house next to a tall fir tree.

The old house has its problems. There are creaks and leaks, and the paint is peeling in some places.

But when the heater breaks down, Dad bakes apple pie so that the oven can warm the kitchen, and Dad plays guitar and old records and they dance to warm up in the living room. In the backyard, the house has a clothesline, his trampoline, and a garden for his cat to hide in and a place to grow tomatoes, and Leo has a window high up in his backyard where he can watch new apartments being built all over the neighborhood.

One day Leo's dad picked him up from school. They got ice cream instead of going home.

"I got a letter from our landlord," Leo's dad said. They have sold our house and are tearing it down. We are going to have to move."

Leo is so angry that he says he will not leave his room so they can't tear it down. Dad is mad, too, and they have a screaming, guitar-shredding, dancing around wildly, MAD party. They feel a little better but they still have to move. Gradually their things begin to disappear into big boxes. Their cat peers suspiciously at the cat carrier in the living room. Soon their house is not really their house, just empty closets and cold floors and bare walls.

"Let's paint on them!" said Dad."

Their mural of their garden makes both of them a little less sad, but soon it was time for the move to a little white house. It is small, and everything looks out of place in the different rooms. But the cat is happy to get out of the carrier, Leo jumps on his trampoline and swings in his swing in the new backyard, and Leon and Dad play their music and dance like they always liked to do. And looking at the bare walls in his new bedroom, Leo has a new idea. He and his dad paint the little blue house with its tall fir tree there, just as they remember it, theirs to remember together always.

It's home, again, a new beginning, in Phoebe Wald's, The Blue House (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), in a poignant story of making a house a home which has been likened to Virginia Lee Burton's class Caldecott Medal book, The Little House. Wald's charming illustrations and sensitive look at a father and son who learn that the important thing is not where they live, but to be together wherever they live, to make common memories of their lives together. Home is where the heart is, and the heart is wherever the ones you love are. This book shares a timeless but reassuring message that helps children deal with change. In their starred review, Horn Book calls this one “An affecting story about loss and starting over.”

Finding Home: Home Is a Window by Stephanie Parsley Ledyard

HOME IS

HELLO, SWEET PEA,
AND A HUG.

Home is a door where someone is waiting with a hug. It's a cozy chair with a sleeping dog and a little bit of green by the window.

It's a long table with a family sharing dinner and drying dishes beside Mom after dinner.

It's a favorite quilt on your bed to cozy under at night, with the light from Ms. Vera's window next door as the nightlight on your wall.

It's a stairway with family pictures hung all the way to the top, things that stay the same, day to day.

But what if... one day all those things go away? What if they are packed up and loaded up, and all you have of home is your pillow in the car and...

... THE SHIRT THAT SMELLS LIKE YOUR OLD ROOM.

AND THEN--
HERE WE ARE.

What makes a house a home? Familiar things, yes, but mostly the family inside. In Stephanie Parsley Ledyard's Home Is a Window (Neal Porter Books/Holiday House, 2019), the cozy quilt becomes the tablecloth for a floor picnic surrounded by boxes, and there's a window with with a plant and Mom and Dad just beyond.

Moving is a common childhood experience, and Ledyard's sweet story of family life reinforces the theme that home is where the heart is, where there's a hug waiting just beyond the door. Pixar artist Chris Sasiki's richly evocative illustrations done in homey faux naif paintings in soft muted colors ease the sense of loss and suggest that the new home will be a happy one, with a window with a little bit of green. Share this one with Deborah Underwood's Bad Bye, Good Bye (see review here)

Stephanie Ledyard is also the author of Pie Is for Sharing.

Take Me Wit'cha When You Go! Bruce's Big Move (Mother Bruce) by Ryan T. Higgins

Bruce was a bear who lived with four geese because he was their mother.

And three mice, because they would not leave.

It all started in two earlier books when Bruce, the curmudgeonly bachelor bear whose only hobby is as an epicure of fresh eggs, swipes four goose eggs from Mother Goose, all of which hatch as soon as he gets them home and imprint instantly on him. Impromptu Mother Goose Bruce grumpily attempts to be a good goose parent, even taking the goslings south for the winter. But when Mother Bruce and his brood return to his den, he finds it manned by way too many mice who have appropriated it as a popular backwoods inn which is literally a zoo!

Now Bruce has had it with his messy menage, littered with goose toys and assorted wildlife, and he concludes that the only way out is to lose the lot of them and move. Bruce mails his resident mice off to Tasmania, the Mojave Desert, and the Yukon, packs his confused goslings into the sidecar of his motorcycle, and roars off in search of suitable housing sans mice!

Bruce buys a roomy cabin in the deep woods, hoping for solitude and hopefully a bit of hibernation this year, only to discover he has a friendly neighbor, Miz Beaver, eager to offer her thirteen little sisters as perfect playmates for his little geese.

And if that isn't enough, when the mice drive up with all their worldly goods in a truck labeled MUSCULUS MOVERS, Bruce knows that his goose is cooked (and his sorely needed hibernation cancelled), in Ryan T. Higgins' third book in series, Bruce's Big Move (Mother Bruce) (Hyperion Books, 2017). Like it or not, Bruce Bear is stuck with being head of an unruly household, with a lawn party constantly in progress. Higgin's illustrations are hilarious, with the beetled-browed Mother Bruce steadfastly attempting to parent his clueless goslings while trying to rid himself of the manipulative mice he simply can't lose. Mother Goose Bruce is back and primary-graders will welcome the return of his merry menagerie.

Earlier books in this hit series are Mother Bruce, Hotel Bruce (Mother Bruce), and Higgins' companion backstory of the squatter mice, BE QUIET! (See reviews here).