The House with 100 Stories

This vertically formatted counting story opens as Tochi, an astronomy-loving kid with pale skin and a Tintin-like quiff, receives a mysterious invitation from the sky to visit the top floor of a 100–story tower. As “up, up, up Tochi climbed” through each of the edifice’s rooms, he learns that each block of 10 stories serves as a multilevel home for a different anthropomorphized animal community. The creatures welcome Tochi’s polite arrival, piquing his curiosity about “what’s next?” After traversing the floors via fanciful sets of stairs, ladders, and, in one case, a series of chutes, Tochi’s top-floor host is finally revealed to be the Spider Prince, who presides over a high-altitude observatory that proves a perfect setting for two stargazers to forge a friendship and indulge their love of planets and stars. The premise gives artist Iwai plenty of opportunities to tickle readers’ fancy and encourage repeated viewings: the enumerated floors are shown as cutaway-style rooms, each spotlighting details and vignettes that illuminate each species’ particular domestic lives and interior design tastes. Readers should get a good giggle from how the snakes’ house is built for slithering and how the lightly eerie bat house has everything upside down—including the toilet and bathtub. Ages 4–8. (Nov.)