The Neighbors

The girl with the bright-green frog umbrella who narrates this tightly focused story has invented tales about her building’s residents based on the distinctive appearance of their doors. The first has several locks and a surveillance camera. “That apartment belongs to a family of thieves,” the girl announces; the apartment, revealed in a page turn, contains a symphony of luxurious museum pieces, and the family is dressed all in black, with face masks. The door on floor two is “always surrounded by muddy footprints.” A gardener? No. “That is the home of an old explorer and his pet tiger.” Each family enterprise is more unlikely than the next, and the spreads burst with appropriate domestic detritus; a vampire seamster’s apartment (floor four) is littered with notions and art deco furniture. The girl’s own apartment, by contrast, has ordinary furniture and an ordinary set of parents. Or does it? Tsarfati (An After Bedtime Story) offers accomplished execution, sureness of line, and restrained, urbane humor. Her story celebrates both imaginative power and the way great imaginations sometimes miss what’s closest to them. Ages 4–8. [em](Jan.) [/em]