A delightful early chapter book with themes of family and community, and the start of a promising series.
Nine-year-old Ella lives with her two moms, artistic Livy and more structured Abby, at 1106 Wildflower Place, a small, old apartment house in San Francisco. New neighbors have just moved in and she’s determined to welcome the young couple and tell them about the rules and quirks of the building. Ella is a chatty, cheerful guide, and friends with almost everyone there, including Matilda, the artsy, flamboyant woman who lives downstairs and is Ella’s companion for tea; and Jacques and Merland, the two-man couple across the hall. The only people she doesn’t really know are the Robinsons, the secretive couple on the top floor.
Each illustrated chapter offers a connected vignette in Ella’s life and reveals a little more about this close-knit community. We learn about the shared garden and when Ella was the flower girl at Jacques and Merland’s wedding, for example. There’s also a throughline that emerges as Ella tries to learn more about the mysterious Robinsons, but the rhythm of the story is of everyday community life, not action and mystery. Ella muses throughout the book, too, about the nature of time, a charming addition that gives us insight into her active mind.
Ella has enough spunk to be fun but enough kindness to be a charming role model. She’s precocious, but not annoyingly so; she’s clearly one of those kids who is comfortable around adults and mature enough to walk Jacques and Merland’s dogs in the nearby park by herself, but not so beyond her years that she refuses to have her mom Abby tuck her into bed at night.
The publisher’s blurb makes comparisons to children’s series Ivy + Bean, The Penderwicks, and Eloise, with a dash of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City. Those all seem like apt comparisons, even as Ella, her family, and her neighbors feel new and original as well. I look forward to future books in the series!
Ella and her moms are White; one new neighbor reads as Asian, and Mr. Robinson as a person of color, while Mrs. Robinson is White. One of Jacques and Merland is a person of color and the other likely White or Asian (but the illustration of them is unlabeled, so it’s unclear who is who. (I also have a suspicion that Matilda is trans, although there are no indications of this in the text; maybe it’s just that the images of her remind me of trans author Jennifer Finney Boylan. Since this could be my own imagining, I’m not tagging the book as having a trans character unless a subsequent volume makes this clear; until then, interpret her as you will.)
