“So now I’m the king of the castle,” the boy explains.

The boy’s brother is far too interested in hanging out with his friends to partake in tree house things. You can’t see the stars because the city is too bright, but you can see the city, and the city is enough.īut the next summer in the tree house, everything is different. I’d never seen my own story so expressed in literature before.ĭad gets to work though and builds a tree house with his boys, a fantastic secret space with a view of the entire neighourhood. A small boy moves to a new house with a big backyard and gets to planning: “I planned tree houses that could turn into flying ships at the flick of a switch./ I planned tree houses with secret slides for quick getaways./ I planned one tree house that had two levels, one for me and one for my brother.” He and his brother put their plans together and show them to their dad who tells them, “When I was a kid, I wanted a tree house more than anything else in the world.” He’d made plans, just like his sons do, but his never came to fruition. We made do with the basement crawlspace instead, until we grew too tall and started hitting our heads.Īnd so I was amused to encounter fervid tree house planning in Andrew Larsen’s latest picture book In the Tree House, and even to encounter tree house planning disappointment. I don’t know what ever happened to those blueprints, but their memory lives on in infamy as a symbol of childhood disappointment, of the hideout we never had. (My dad also backed his car over my bike on more than one occasion, but that’s a story for another day.) In the months that followed that Christmas, we moved to a new city and our nation’s economy fell into recession, two factors that probably played a role in the playhouse’s failure to come into existence. For Christmas 1988, we received a set of blueprints for a playhouse that was never ever built. With everything my parents did right (which was most things), we still do so delight in tormenting them over holiday dinners with recollections of where they failed us and the story topper-most of all of these is the saga of the playhouse plans. I don’t know if it was because I was a girl that all fantasies came with visions of curtains at the windows, but I wanted a tree house regardless, a cool place for summer nights high above my suburban backyard.

But when I was a child, I dreamed of a tree house, a place up a ladder to call my own. We like to imagine that we live in one, what with the giant trees that cover our house in shade and maple keys, and the squirrels always on the run past our door. Oh, there is nothing else quite like a tree house. MaIn the Tree House by Andrew Larsen and Dusan Petricic