This Home We Have Made

Inspired by their experiences working with formerly homeless children who painted and designed a mural on the side of an apartment building in New York City's blighted South Bronx (see Children's Bookbag, May 24), Hammond and Matunis spin a story to explain and conjoin that mural's images. ``One night,'' begins the narrator, a homeless girl, ``while my mother and brother were asleep under a stairway, I crept out to look at the stars.'' She ends up being invited to participate in a ``building parade'' wherein animals, musicians and neighbors erect an apartment house. Spanish text appears below the English on every page. While there is some genuine pathos (``Why don't I have a building of my own?'' a child asks), the vocabulary (``bulbous''; ``cockscombed'') can be unsuitable and the story sometimes stretches rather thinly to accommodate the pictures-- Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach , also derived from previously existing visual work, better balanced art and text. The pictures themselves, however, have a powerful energy: boldly colored beasts, strange trees, an angel, a clown, children and their families, and a toy-size skyscraper dance against cement-textured backgrounds. A full-page description of how the project came into being accompanies a four-page foldout of the entire mural, and readers may well prefer that straightforward account to the story. Ages 4-8. (June)