Mary and the Mouse, The Mouse and Mary

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 30 JULI 2007

Admirers of The Borrowers and The Tale of Two Bad Mice will smile at this beguiling comparison of human- and mouse-scale worlds, Donofrio's (Riding in Cars with Boys) children's debut. Mary, a midcentury child who favors flouncy skirts, lives with parents and siblings. In the same house, behind a wall, lives a mouse who "had a mother and a father and a sister and a brother, too." Mary learns to beware of mice; the mouse, of people. "So Mary didn't tell her family about the mouse. And the mouse didn't tell about Mary." Nonetheless, Mary often steals a glimpse inside the mousehole to exchange a wave with her friend. With an antique palette and an engraver's fluid line, McClintock (Ad le & Simon) designs ingenious accessories for the anthropomorphic mice. When a newly hippie-ish Mary leaves for college in a VW Beetle, the mouse packs her things in a walnut shell. Mary's dorm room matches the mouse's underground home, down to the green bedspread, yellow sheets and overflowing hamper; Mary's striped pink rug looks just like the pink sock by the mouse's bed. Eventually Mary raises her own children in a modern, glass-walled house, and her daughter, Maria, meets the mouse's child. True, Donofrio and McClintock indulge in nostalgia and pay no heed to rodents' life expectancy. Yet only a jaded reader could fail to be bewitched by McClintock's meticulous panels or her piquant cover art, with its swingy hand-lettering and swaying heroines. Donofrio and McClintock give exquisite attention to the girl's and mouse's parallel lives, emphasizing cross-generational connections and shared secrets. Ages 3-7.