In Front of My House

In Front of My House

By Andrea Belcham

A review of In Front Of My House by Marianne Dubuc

Published on October 1, 2010

In Front Of My House
Marianne Dubuc

Kids Can Press
$19.95
hardcover
120pp
978-1-55453-641-2

Dubuc’s cyclical picture book uses bright and deceptively simplistic coloured-pencil drawings to relay a personal catalogue in which the narrator’s imagination takes flight. “In front of my house,” it begins, ” . . . a rosebush. On the rosebush . . . a little bird. Above the little bird . . . a window” – and so it continues. We turn the page with each new naming, and it isn’t long before we’ve left reality behind and entered the realm of fairy tale, then wildlife, then on to darkness and the creatures that dwell within it, up into space, and back home again: 120 pages of discovering what’s concealed “behind,” “in,” “around,” “under,” or “on” the previous image. Dubuc uses a lot of white space to frame her images, so that they seem like a child’s drawings freshly made on the page – a journal of the mundane and fantastic. Like an extended game of peek-a-boo, In Front of My House will keep readers wondering what comes next. mRb

Andrea Belcham lives in Saint-Lazare, where many of her best neighbours are trees.

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