If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen

If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen

Rating: 5 stars

We are huge fans of Maine author Chris Van Dusen.  His three Magee books get checked out (literally) a whole lot.  His If I Built A Car book is read whenever one of my three kids spots it around the house.  Could Van Dusen really write another book that is just as wonderful as these four?

Yes.  Yes, he can!  And (much to our delight) yes he DID!  (Did you hear my kids and I just go crazy with applause and cheering?)

The race track room is (not surprisingly) my boys' favorite room.

This time, the boy/narrator plays in his backyard and starts designing a creative structure with the Legos, sticks, Tinkertoys, and Frisbee that are within reach.  He begins to tell his mom that their house is okay, but if he built a house, he'd do it a whole lot differently.

The rooms he thinks up are the stuff of kids' wildest dreams: a tall, tall room with a button that takes away gravity and allows you to fly, a bedroom similar to the Space Needle that has an elevator to get you up and a twisty, turny slide to get you down, a living room that includes built-in trampolines on the floor that guide you to a pit with oodles of soft balls.

Playdate at this kid's house, please!

But all of those rooms come after the kitchen, which interests me very much:

We'll start with the basics, right off the bat
Check out my all-in-one Kitchen-O-Mat!
You don't have to cook and you don't have to clean
It's done by a space-age robotic machine
It makes all the meals and the food is deee-lish!
Then it washes and puts away every last dish.

If I Built a House is, I think, a bigger hit than If I Built A Car for the simple reason that smaller kids can design non-moving, house-like structures more easily than they can create vehicles that must move.  Whenever we read it, the kids' next move is to grab blocks or Legos, Tinkertoys or Play-doh, or simply just paper and pencil and think up the house of their very own.

Once again Chris Van Dusen has created magic with this magically creative book!