THE MOVING BOOK

The characters from The Airport Book (2016) and The Hospital Book (2023) help young readers make sense of another challenging childhood experience: moving.

“Our family moves a lot,” a child in a baseball cap tells a younger sibling. “But you probably don’t remember.” As the young narrator reminisces about the family’s “tiny apartment in a big house,” the accompanying image shows Mom, clearly expecting, dressing a younger, diaper-clad version of the protagonist. Later, they relocated to “the tall building with a lot of stairs.” Here, the bigger sibling rests on the stairs while Dad, baby in a front pack, lugs a grocery bag. When they lived in “the big building with three elevators,” trick-or-treating took place indoors, and “Grandpa lived far away, but Nana and Poppa were near.” Finally, the narrator asks, “Remember when we moved into this house?” A “sold” sign by the door hints that more moving’s in store. “Sometimes I don’t want to move,” the narrator confides, but in the final pages, the new house, with its bunk beds and lovely garden, looks a lot like home. Relying on a pitch-perfect combination of minimal text and expansive artwork, Brown once more offers a richly vivid, honest, and reassuring depiction of a potentially unfamiliar experience. Her colorful, clean-lined cartoons are full of sweet vignettes—each scene is practically a story in itself—and charming, humorous details that often gently contradict the text. The family is multiracial; Dad and the children are brown-skinned, while Mom is pale-skinned.

An impressively understated, respectful exploration of a big change.