What's behind that door?

Katherine Marsh has created a terrific middle grade book with just the right amount of mystery, fairy tale, and plenty of heart. Kelly Murphy's full page illustrations add the perfect finishing touch.
But wait until you savor descriptions of the traditional Russian food:

• Creamy cured pork belly followed by thin pancakes with sweet cottage cheese and raisins fried in butter.
• Suckling pig and buckwheat porridge topped with nuts and fruits
• Stew of salted beef and sour cabbage
• Fish, rice, and an onion pie called kulibyaka
• Thick slices of warm freshly baked bread and blackberry jam.

One vibrant story thread is the magic of Slavic fairy tales woven throughout the book. Readers meet Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a house with chicken legs and who travels through the air in her magical mortar and pestle; Domovoi, the rarely seen house spirit who lives inside an old boot; and of course the Firebird with its magical brightly glowing feathers. 

• "Your first mushroom hunt, my dear?  Flowers grow by sunlight, mushrooms by moonlight."
• "I keep my soul outside my body, in an egg. It's hidden away where no one - not even Baba Yaga- can find it."
• "She could even see a few stars. They seemed to be falling toward her, and then, with a dizzying rush, she realized it was she who was rising toward them.
  'The bowl - it's flying!' she exclaimed.
  'It's a mortar.'"
• "There's one more thing I want...Some magic of my own."

But more than anything this is a story of home and the innate longing everyone possesses for a place to call home.

• "The book was her most cherished possession now that Caleb and her mother were gone. But it was a poor substitute for a family."
• "Mary could hardly believe her ears. Home. For four years she had longed to hear this word."
• "You have no home, devochka."  ​"Yes, I do. Yours."
• "All I know is that I was once a girl with a home and family, and then, one night I woke up alone..."
• "You have nothing to give. A home without love isn't a home."

Loss, friendship, magic, belonging, and the relationship between the real and the fantastical are woven together in The Door by the Staircase.

• "...but weaving! What is life but warp and weft?"
• "Motion conquers emotion," Madam Z continued, inspecting the cloth as if Mary's feelings had been woven into it. "That is why when I have a problem I always weave."
• "​Real life is more complicated than fairy tales."