THE SOMEDAY HOUSE

This flight of imagination by Shelby (Homeplace, 1995, etc.) has a poignant cast. ""Someday,"" promises the narrator, ""we'll live in a house on a mountain. We'll sit on the roof and fill the sky with bubbles."" ""Someday, we'll live in a house by the sea,"" or above a bakery, underground, even in space, and somehow, the melancholy implication is that there is no home just now. Folding warm colors together, Litzinger gives her paintings a cheerful aspect that lightens the tone rather than fighting it; three children, each with a different skin color, smile, and play in and around a small house that is adapted to different situations and is last seen with DNA-like strings of extra rooms twisting above the roof. Pair this with Eve Bunting's FlyAway Home (1991) or Elizabeth Hathorn's Way Home (1994) to set younger readers thinking.