Make Yourself at Home Book Review

Make Yourself at Home 

By Signe Torp

Published by Thames and Hudson, October 20, 2020

Mom's Review

It's awesome. I love it. T loves it. You could jump around or read it cover to cover. It is better to read it in two chunks rather than straight through, simply to save your voice.

Why Make Yourself at Home is awesome:

• Larger size lends itself well to an examination of the home's features.
  
• Readers are greeted in the native language by a resident child on each page.
  
• Informative text imparts relevant details at a level that appeals to all and is understandable to younger children.
  

• Diversity of abodes highlights that everywhere is different, and that there's not just one "normal" kind of home. (stilt houses in Cambodia to skyscrapers in New York City to a siheyuan in Beijing and beyond)
  

I think it is particularly important for American children to see how people live all over the world because they/we are inundated with the idea that a family should live in a free-standing house with a yard and a garage. Since the majority of people in the world do not actually live like that, normalizing the variety of living situations is valuable. And it's not just people in other countries who don't live in a Norman Rockwell picture. Even in just the first four years of T's life, he lived in a rented apartment, a rented house, and the house we have now bought. When T was younger, two of our favorite books were Corduroy and The Snowy Day because the children lived in apartments like us. So many of his other books showed families in houses, presenting an obstacle in connecting with them. To get to the point, Make Yourself at Home is an eye-catching book that appeals to children and adults alike. Plus, there's the benefit of developing a sense of global citizenship by debunking the picket fence-house-yard-garage myth. T and I had a lot of fun talking about what we liked about the different homes and where we would want to live. As you'll see below, he is pretty enthusiastic about igloos. I would love a tree house in Vanuatu or Burg Eltz in Germany

Side note: The castle in Germany is not actually named as Burg Eltz, but I can't imagine it to be any other one. First, it looks just like it. Second, the Eltz family still lives in their castle just as the family does in the book's castle. T's dad and I were excited to see it included. (And I used Burg Eltz as the inspiration for a middle-grade novel I wrote some years ago, so it was just fun to see it pop up in a published children's book.)

Son's Review

(Age: 5)

What's your favorite house?

The igloo. It's cool. It would be living outside and something built with outside materials. It makes me want to visit the place they have the igloo in, in hunting season. 

What is interesting?

The bathroom stuff in the igloo. I would never have guessed that: going to pee in a cup* and taking it out in the morning 'cuz it's so cold at night, but warmer in the morning.  I thought they would have just gone potty outside. Dad and I are going to build an igloo in the winter. We're gonna make tunnels. You can make windows out of just ice. 

*Not actually a cup.

Note: A review copy was provided in exchange for an honest review.