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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Influential artist Carson Ellis makes her solo picture-book debut with a beautifully imaginative tribute to the many possibilities of home.The picture book debut of Carson Ellis, acclaimed illustrator of the Wildwood series and Lemony Snicket's The Composer is Dead, this is a gorgeous, imaginative celebration of the many possibilities of home. Home might be a house in the country, a flat in the city, or even a shoe. There are clean homes, messy homes, sea homes and bee homes. Home resides on the road or the sea, in the realm of myth, or in the artist's own studio. This loving look at the places where people live brims with intriguing characters and is a visual treat that demands many a return visit.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers 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.

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.

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

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.

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.