Written in Seussian rhyming couplets, Charlottetown author David Weale’s Doors in the Air begins with a small boy itemizing the various parts of his house and its contents, employing alliteration that makes reading it aloud a pleasure: “There are baskets and boxes / Big bowls and books.” Pierre Pratt’s double-page illustration here is particularly appealing, showing the household objects mentioned in the text, as well as some that are slightly more exotic: an accordion, an empty bird cage, a radiator. And then the book narrows its focus: of all the wonderful things that can be found in a house, none is more extraordinary than its doors.

Doors represent liberation, permitting passage from one place to another, opening up the world. A red bird appears, gawky and tall, leading both the boy and the reader out an ordinary back door, away from the quotidian, and into a jungle. From there, the boy follows the bird into a dreamland of doorways, staircases, and keyholes, flying fish and flowering vines. Another spread takes its cue from those ubiquitous posters of city doorways cast in bright reds, blues, and greens, one of which opens onto an intensely blue, cloud-streaked sky.

In one of the final illustrations, the boy is perched atop an orange door like a flying carpet, on a journey to the moon. The accompanying text suggests there is no doorway more important than one’s limitless imagination, and drives home the book’s subversive and powerful message: “Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.”

Doors in the Air is a fantastical triumph, celebrating the spaces in which the ordinary and extraordinary intersect.