Neighbors by Kasya Denisevich

If you have children in your or library who live in an apartment building this would be a great book to share. And if the children live in free standing houses this might give them some idea about the differences other children experience from living in a building with lots of other people in homes that may look exactly like yours. 

I listened in to a library session with a kindergarten group in a school library today. The Teacher-Librarian asked the young children if they knew their address. Strangely very few children could repeat their full address (which is kind of scary if they were ever lost or needed to tell an authority person such as the police exactly where they live).  In this book the young child is moving to a new address:

"I know my new address by heart. 3 Ponds Lane, building 2, apartment 12."

The young girl is happy to have her own room but she also wonders about the people who live above, below and beside her. On one spread we see the real neighbors and then on the next page wonderful possibilities from her imagination. Do Snow White and her seven dwarf friends live on the floor above? Perhaps a mermaid lives on the top floor. You might also spy Cinderella's coach, three princesses enjoying dinner and a unicorn. The little girl has not yet met anyone and she begins to wonder if perhaps she is really all alone in this huge building. Luckily early the next morning as her mum walks her out their door she sees another young girl - the girl next door - and she is also heading to school. 

The art in this book is wonderful. Black, white and grey tones with spot colour of red and yellow. 

Denisevich’s fine-lined ink drawings are beguiling, and there’s a lot of detail to pore over here. It’s a book for lingering. She uses color, sparingly, to great effect. The grayscale illustrations pop with subtle spots of red, including occasionally in the text, to represent our narrator. It is not until her day of school that we finally start to see shades of other colors, including a sunny spot of yellow for a new friend in the hallway—and then in the blossoms of trees as they walk to school. The book’s endpapers—the tiles of the building’s hallway—also play cleverly with color.  Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Kasya Denisevich is a Russian-born author and illustrator now living in Barcelona. Her work has been featured in the 2017 Bologna Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition. This is her debut picture book. 

I would pair this book with: