Welcome through the doorway of this picture book … about doors!
Some doors may give you a nervous, fizzy feeling … and also make you glad you came.
There are so many kinds of doors: swinging doors and sliding doors, screen doors for feeling the night air, revolving doors for going around and around. Doors that open into … anything you can imagine! A birthday party, a shipwreck on the salty sea floor, a fairy’s tiny home, a slide into a room full of pillows! Or even the fantastical future ahead. Where will the doorway of this picture book lead? The only way to find out is to turn the page and go through …
In a playful ode to Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig and Remy Charlip’s essay A Page Is a Door, this imagination-sparking picture book is for anyone entering a new phase of life—and invites readers of all ages to embrace the possibilities that wait for them behind every new door.
Editions
- North America: Tundra
- Italy: Terre di Mezzo.
- French Rights: La Pasteque
- Spanish and Catalan: Editorial Juventud
- Germany: von Hacht Verlag GmbH
- Turkey: Mea Kitap
Illustrator
Julie Morstad is the author and illustrator of Today, How To and Time Is a Flower, which was a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book, winner of the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize, and a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award, among other honors. She has illustrated many other beloved stories for children, including Kate DiCamillo’s The Puppets of Spelhorst. In 2018, she illustrated a stamp for Canada Post. Julie lives in Vancouver, B.C., the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory and traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. You can find her at www.juliemorstad.com.
Reviews
“Maclear’s succinct, effective second-person narration adds a welcome interactive feel to the text, inviting readers to enter every space the book introduces. Morstad’s innovative mixed-media illustrations depict young children and, occasionally, animals in various situations, some realistic, others fantastical. The book encourages readers to open doors and see what awaits on the other side.”
—Horn Book (starred review)
“Maclear’s text is open-ended in its praise for its subject, giving Morstad full rein to unleash her creative powers, and she obliges, filling pages with everything from unicorns to rainbow-striped mystery tunnels … Whimsical, wonderful, and altogether magical. A doorway to doorways and beyond.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In dialogue with some children’s literature greats, the creators meaningfully highlight doors as metaphors for openness.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Reminiscent in tone and style of the classic A Hole Is to Dig, these two brilliant creators deftly sweep readers into the infinite wonder and potential that awaits behind doors of all kinds.”
—Lynn Becker, Shelf Awareness
“They are brilliant individually, but each book by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad together is an open door. There are metaphors and there are images. They work together unobtrusively, inviting children to look at the world in ways that are both familiar to them, and a bit different…Once you enter this book, you will want to return many times.”