Originally a Slovenian publication, there’s no trouble carrying A Boy and a House over to another language or culture because the story is told solely in pictures.
I downloaded this one to review for two reasons: the beautiful cover, and the mention of the cat!
The goal of the book is to get young readers talking, to have them find their own stories in the pictures, and the pictures are gorgeous, but I definitely didn’t get the most out of them in black and white on my Kindle.
Naturally, this is the sort of book you want in paper, not digital form.

What's That Up There?

This is Slovenian artist Maja Kastelic's debut picture book. It is a simple wordless story of a young boy's search through an apparently empty house. As he travels upwards and toward the light at the top we are led to wonder who or what he might find at the end of his journey. Interestingly, in its first draft, the boy and the cat he has been following arrive at the roof of the building and celebrate the magnificent view of the dawning new day. Upon reflection Kastelic decided the story needed more, and we now have this young boy collecting drawings he finds on the floor as he climbs, and ultimately meeting a young girl with whom he can share the view over the town. Ms. Kastelic was pleased with the story as a tale "of friendship and finding a way to one another", and so it now stands in final form.

The work is done in watercolors with heavy emphasis on sienna, brown, umber and similar muted colors. The house that the boy explores is not any particular house but an amalgam of grand old houses and their interiors, many drawn from photos of old Slovenian town houses. There are lots of inside jokes, many particular to the artist, including self portraits, objects from her own home and so on. The larger goal, though, was to present a setting of larger and more general authenticity and interest, and it certainly seems to me that that is what you get here.

Lots of picture books claim to be worth close study and lots of wordless books suggest that they can be the source of endless homemade, in the mind of the reader, tales and fantasies. I don't always buy that blurb, but here it does seem to be true. There is so much detail, so many unexplored twists and turns and corners, and so many ways for the boy to proceed that it is easy and inviting to play along and make up one's own tales about what is being portrayed.

So, this is beautifully drawn and colored, and nicely structured to invite and encourage exploration and playful interpretation. A very elegant addition to the picture book collection. (Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

OK, I'll bite – the obvious reference here is Shaun Tan, especially as this wordless graphic story is so open to interpretation. However it has much less of his scale, even while sharing so much of his visual quality and attention to detail. A boy thinks he's chasing a black cat through open doors in a strange and empty building, when what he's really doing is following a different mystery back to its source. The reveal isn't a hugely surprising one, but all the same the design craft here makes this a book to pore over – gnomic sayings, mottos and scratchings litter the house, as do many other details – things unfinished, empty bird cages, keys on hooks, departing reptilian tails… I'd suggest the cat knows exactly what it's doing, as there are so many mice it's ignoring, and so do the creators of this book. I'd also point out the small art gallery in the building – and mention the wonderful, subdued palette of colours here that makes this worthy of being exhibited itself. Worth anyone's time.