A HOUSE IN THE MAIL

Andreasen (Tattered Sails, 2001, etc.) has chosen to frame this tale about a pre-Depression Kentucky family getting a new mail-order house as a scrapbook, with 11-year-old Emily’s narrative running alongside arrays of drawings, advertisements, diagrams, antique-looking photos, small keepsakes, and other memorabilia, all rendered with photorealistic precision. Having spent most of her life sharing the attic with little brother Homer, Emily is understandably thrilled to sit down at the table with her parents and pick out a house from a catalogue—a house with not only a room just for her, but such modern conveniences as indoor plumbing, an electric refrigerator, and a gas range. Half the town turns out when the house arrives in prefabricated parts, and, for Emily at least, the excitement never flags through the months of hard work it takes to put it all together. Her account is more a broad outline than a tally of nitty-gritty details, but like Jane Yolen’s Raising Yoder’s Barn (1998), it will leave young readers seeing the walls and buildings around them with new eyes. For a sense of period, you could hardly do better than these evocative illustrations. (Picture book. 7-9)