Books like Frankie's Bau-Wau Haus by Melanie Brown and Anthony Lawlor, illustrated by Elaine Arnold, welcome children into sophisticated nonfiction content in hilarious ways. This book is from 1995, a fun story with lots of language and little melodrama. The inside covers and centerfold show archictural drawings of a doghouse. The story is the sequence of steps necessary to build a house, carried out by a dog and mouse team. More specifically, this book introduces Bauhaus , and an arial view of the neighborhood shows how different this design is from the neighbors' homes. My search for "the world famous architect, Margaret Mallory Main" who designed the doghouse yielded a "Margaret Mallory endowment" at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The names of the mouse children in this story are Miles, Van, Der, and Roche--names that reference a famous German-American architect. The technology in the story is now dated, but this doesn't detract from the the fun.
I always look for books like this one that blend particular world knowledge with a lovely tale.
