Building Our House by Jonathan Bean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I would call this informational biography. The story is drawn from Bean's life, although his narrator is the unnamed little girl. Heavy nostalgia permeates the entire telling, making building your own home with no other place to live seem like the most idyllic thing any family could do. It draws on a tradition of this theme that reaches out to the Little House books, Walden, and others. The cartoon outlines give the book a graphic novel feel, or Virginia Lee Burton.
Bean controls the pacing by breaking up the spreads into 1, 2, 4, 6 sections. Just when things are really complicated in six sections, the next double is a wide expanse of one picture and one text block again, slowing things down for a long visual experience. Right in the center of the story is a great reproduction of a blueprint. There is a gentle complementary narrative running through the illustrations if you watch the kids, the pets, and the mom. So while the text is almost completely corresponding to the pictures, the pictures offer a little more.
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