Bolormaa Baasansuren, author-illustrator, English adaptation by Helen Mixter,
My Little Round House
Groundwood Books, House of Anansi Press, 2009.

Ages 2-5

In Bolormaa Baasansuren’s My Little Round House, a child recounts his first year of life in a nomadic Mongolian family. From his mother’s womb to the round cradle he sleeps in, to the family’s round yurt, or ger, to the very dome of the sky above, the little boy lives in a peaceful encircling world despite his family’s seasonal moves. Four times during his first year, his parents disassemble their home, pack up their belongings, load them on their camels, and move to a new locale, their goats and sheep following along. The seasons change from green summer to yellow autumn to deep winter, when “nights were so long that we slept a lot.”

Baasansuren, who studied Fine Arts in Mongolia, Italy, and Russia, is an award-winning illustrator  from Ulaanbaatar. My Little Round House  was first published in Japan, after the artwork for the book won the Grand Prize at the 2004 Noma Coucours. Baasansuren's illustrations depict a prosperous rural family living a traditional life in a demanding climate. Even in summer, we see no shadows of the sun, only the fertile green land. The parents and grandparents wear traditional dress and their well-made, elegant domestic objects (some unfamiliar and unexplained in the text) create an inviting, if unusual, home.

This beautiful picture book transmits a sense of wonder about the natural world and the changing seasons that every young child will appreciate. Toddlers will respond to the sense of safety and home evoked in the story and pictures; pre-schoolers will be interested to learn, for example, that the poles supporting the family’s ger are wrapped in white felt, and to observe the elaborately costumed adults at work in their daily life. They may wonder what it means to “clean fences” and puzzle over various items of clothing (the hats are exotically wonderful), tools, and decorative items in the home. Mongolia comes alive as a fabulous, otherworldly and yet deeply familiar place: familiar because in My Little Round House, family love translates clearly across cultures.

Charlotte Richardson
April 2009