Playhouse

Rene’s parents are as nice as can be. When Rene asks her father to build her a playhouse, her father says “good idea,” and builds her one. When Rene tells her mother that her playhouse needs a play barn, Rene gets that too! But before long Rene wants a play cow, a play tractor, and more.

When her mother refuses to build her a play mommy and a play daddy she decides to make her own. But when she finds that her parents have replaced her with a play Rene, she quickly realizes that REAL families are the best of all.

Playhouse was inspired by a girl from Saskatchewan who wrote to Robert Munsch as part of a school assignment and sent him a picture of her giant two-story playhouse.

Telling stories is what Robert Munsch does — and loves best. From the first time he stood in front of a group of children as a student teacher at a nursery school in 1972, his jaunty, animated presentation grabbed hold of the imaginations of his listeners and he hasn't let go since.

Before he puts a story to paper, Munsch spends up to three years telling, revising and fine-tuning the tale in front of his rapt audiences. “I figured out once that the stories the kids kept requesting came to two percent of my total output,” he says. But once he discovered how to capture the spontaneity of his narratives in written form, he was on his way to being a successful and sought-after author.

Munsch has published dozens of books in both Canada and the United States. His first efforts, Mud Puddle and The Dark, were published in 1979 and the runaway bestseller Love You Forever was first published in 1986. All of his characters are believably spunky, stubborn and endearing children, while his story lines tend to challenge conventions and stereotypes.

Munsch describes his stories as “middle of the road taboo.” When he uses words like pee and underwear, “the kids go absolutely bananas.” As for the parents, “Eighty percent think it's really neat; the other twenty percent ask, 'How could you?'"

Robert Munsch lives in Ontario, Canada, and continues to perform his own tales — often without advance notice — for day care centers, schools, and libraries.