Illustrator’s agent: Elizabeth Harding, Curtis Brown. It may well persuade readers to trade their ninja outfits for chaps, bandanas, and 10-gallon hats. trailer while they build a house from the ground up, with help from relatives and friends. Working in layers of stenciled four-color imagery, he portrays steers mottled like fine marble, the blinding fury of a dust storm, and an endless night sky of sparkling stars. And sometimes they just listen to the big wide world and its grass song.” Bean ( This Is My Home, This Is My School) beautifully echoes the allusive, musical quality of the text while nodding to the archetypes of the Old West. Jonathan Bean lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a yellow brick building, on the third floor, above a caf, in a small apartment where he keeps all his money and jewels on the doorstep, so thieves can find them, but sleeps with his drawings under the mattress. A young girl (who narrates the story) moves with her mother, father, and baby brother from the city to the country. Building Our House chronicles one family’s step-by-step process of constructing a home from the ground up. Sometimes they listen for trucks, and wolves, and rushing water. Jonathan Bean ( Big Snow) takes his readers on a journey to the countryside in Building Our House. “They’re always listening to their trail boss and to the other cowhands. “Real cowboys are good listeners,” she writes in one such passage.

Hoefler’s text seamlessly blends the workaday with a sense of wonder.

Writing in prose with the lilt and plainspoken poetry of a classic cowboy song, debut author Hoefler makes a winning case that those who are home on the range are self-aware, empathic, conscientious, “as many different colors as the earth,” and include “girls, too.”

Building Our House by Jonathan Bean