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PICTURE BOOKS
Denisevich, Kasya

Neighbors

40 pp. | Chronicle | September, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-1-4521-7775-5 $18.99
(2) K-3 A young girl moves into a new apartment building. "And I finally have a room all to myself!" she thinks. Upon further reflection, though, she realizes that's not quite accurate. "My ceiling is someone's floor and my floor is someone's ceiling"; the wall is another someone's wall. Musing about what her neighbors might be like, she first pictures the apartments around her full of ordinary people going about their normal lives, and then imagines far more whimsical characters and scenarios in the same layout. She continues to ponder as she gets into bed; an almost-mirror-image shows us a second little girl going to sleep in the adjacent apartment. The two girls meet in the morning and head to school together, which prompts a new line of questioning for our protagonist: what are her new classmates like? Spare text is accompanied by ink illustrations full of tiny, delightful details to discover, rewarding viewers' close attention. Initially, accents of red-orange provide the only color in the black-and-white art, but a bit more creeps in with the delicately colored dawn, and yellow is introduced along with the main character's new friend. The final spread shows the girls walking under a pale blue-and-yellow sky as children in the distance, wearing all different colors, make their way to school as well--an image cleverly echoed in the patterned endpapers.
Reviewer: Katie Bircher | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2020

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