by Sam Juliano
The last time a picture book featuring a house as its central character connected intimately with the world around it was none other than Virginia Lee Burton’s Caldecott Medal winning The Little House back in 1940. The indomitable country cottage witnessed technological advancements and population increases, transforming idyllic pastures to urban congestion. Burton’s classic posed the modest structure as a symbol, an unchanging seasonal sentry who watched the countryside transform until she was crowded out to the point where time and place became insignificant. The focus in Deborah Freedman’s This House, Once is more elemental, for whatever the inborn kinship with the world around it. For young readers the book teaches the origin of the materials used to build, for adults the metaphysical implications of how tangible materials were at one time part of nature’s scheme. Indeed, one of children’s literature’s deepest thinkers, Freedman, once an architect, will have the most astute wanting to trace everything back to a starting point. Tucked neatly but resolutely through the pages is an acute sense of loss, unavoidable in a world where turnover is inevitable in both tangible and symbolic ways. (more…)