"As I walked through the actual physical falling-down house, I realized that there was all of this evidence of the passing of time. And as I went from room to room, I started to build this sense of who this family was and the fact that there had been 12 children. And as I was literally looking at their belongings, their schoolbooks, and so on, like a detective, I was piecing together the history of this family and their lives."
"Sophie Blackall is into history: the stories you find in it, the visuals you get from it, the emotions it makes you feel. Farmhouse, which appears on Slate's list of the 25 best picture books of the past 25 years, incorporates items Blackall found in an abandoned house on a property she purchased in upstate New York. Blackall ambitiously imagines the structure's previous life as a family home,"
Farmhouse reconstructs a family's life from objects found in an abandoned upstate New York house and imagines twelve children who once lived there. The narrative traces time's passage through peeling wallpaper and personal belongings, then chronicles nature's reclamation as squirrels and a hibernating bear inhabit the empty rooms. The story culminates in a last-act twist revealing the house as a real place and ends with a detailed cutaway spread depicting the whole house as it stood decades earlier. Cinematic layout choices and a compelling physical format invite immersive reading and reward close visual detective work.
Read at Slate Magazine
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