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For Readers

On "Little Houses": 


Kevin Henkes never really set aside his "child mind"; this is the reason for his success.


Again and again, he creates children who wrestle with the natural world: a baby who struggles to understand what the moon is, a girl who dreams of a garden with invisible carrots ("I hate carrots"), another girl who waits (and waits and waits) for snow.

Henkes's newest brilliant idea is to travel to the beach. His protagonist notes that shells are "little houses" -- and this leads her to imagine her own house with "orange freckles," or her house with "shiny pink walls." She goes on to consider the sounds in a shell -- are these the voices of ghosts who once lived on the beach? What do we really "know" about the ocean? Why--how--are the waves blue and white and silver and purple all at once? What lives on the bottom of the ocean floor? How old are the rocks by the sand? A snowy egret visits. Has the snowy egret ever actually spotted some falling snow?

Life can feel so claustrophobic -- especially with bad climate news, money questions, reports on the Supreme Court. But, still, the ocean exists, and children exist.

I'm grateful to Kevin Henkes for the reminder.









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