Windows [Hardcover]

Walking his dog at dusk, one boy catches glimpses of the lives around him in this lovely ode to autumn evenings, exploring your neighborhood, and coming home.

Before your city goes to sleep, you might head out for a walk, your dog at your side as you go out the door and into the almost-night. Anything can happen on such a walk: you might pass a cat, or a friend, or even an early raccoon. And as you go down your street and around the corner, the windows around you light up one by one until you are walking through a maze of paper lanterns, each one granting you a brief, glowing snapshot of your neighbors as families come together and folks settle in for the night. With a setting that feels both specific and universal and a story full of homages toThe Snowy Day,Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale have created a singular book — at once about the idea of home and the magic of curiosity, but also about how a sense of safety and belonging is something to which every child is entitled.Julia Denos’s prose, spare, evocative and spiced with an occasional, subtle rhyme, is very much in sync with the illustrator E. B. Goodale’s mixed-media art…The highlight of the boy’s sojourn is the end, when he returns home to see his mother in the window, waiting for him. It’s a reassuring moment in these times, when walking at night in a hoodie can have different, even troubling associations for a child of color.
—The New York Times Book Review

It’s a genial take on city life, which makes the neighborhood seem just as comforting as home, though the child’s home—just as luminescent as the windows he or she passes—is surely the most comforting of all. Ideal bedtime reading and a gorgeously understated celebration of everyday enchantment.
—Booklist (starred review)

Readers will want to revisit these pages of impressionistic trees, buildings that blur as they recede into the vanishing poinlc!