ALA Booklist (Tue Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 1996)

A child tells about her front steps, her favorite place to play. In summer, it is there that she pretends to ride horses on the low walls, creates miniature lands, makes a cave with a blanket, and eats Popsicles with her friends. In fall, she sweeps the leaves off the steps, and in winter, she shovels away the snow. The concreteness of the language and the occasional snatches of conversation bring the first-person text to life. Collages of dyed-and-painted papers add a feeling of spontaneity as well as a distinctive style. The main character is portrayed as African American, but her experiences will sound familiar to most city kids. In fact, children who don't have a flight of cracked concrete steps may end up wishing for a stoop of their own. (Reviewed October 15, 1996)

Horn Book

The five front steps and the stoop in front of a young African-American girl's building become a horse, a stage, a school, and a place to be proud of as she creatively entertains herself and her friends in their city neighborhood throughout the year. Borderless, cut-paper collages on a watercolor background add texture and color to the thoughtful story.

Kirkus Reviews

A simple set of five front steps in the city is a child's whole universe, easily becoming playground, hideout, circus arena, school, and home. As the four seasons pass, the unnamed narrator sweeps away all the dirt and bugs and the glass, if some got broken during the night,'' creating a clean slate, a canvas, a stage. She shovels snow, plants crumpled green paper bushes along cement-crack rivers in springtime, and splashes in the fire hydrant's summer spray. Her strong narration focuses on the tiny events that make up a day of make-believe. Derby (Jacob and the Stranger, 1994, etc.) keeps the text fairly general; Burrowes, using a cut-paper collage technique with watercolors, shows a brown-skinned girl in an inner-city environment, but this heroine could be any child and the steps, anywhere. Anyone who has playedpretend'' with cracks in the sidewalk, held a tea party in the shade of a hanging blanket, or ridden a sawhorse to first place will understand the rules of Derby's steps, where each scene has the pleasing simplicity of Peter's world in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (1962). (Picture book. 3-5)"

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1--A gentle story about a child's imaginative play. The front steps of a city building make a wonderful year-round playground for an African-American girl and her friends. The steps are good for hopping up and down, watching people and traffic pass by, coloring with friends, playing school, or pretending to be in a cave with a blanket draped over the stoop. Best of all, setting foot on the front steps after you've been away means you're home again. Bright cut-paper collages with watercolors show cars (that look like miniatures) and animals somewhat distorted in relation to people, but have a fresh, childlike quality. An additional slice-of-urban-life picture book.--Sally R. Dow, Ossining Public Library, NY