MOUSE ON THE RIVER

Mouse embarks on a leisurely boating expedition through the countryside.

Mouse’s Wood (2022) depicted the small rodent at home over the course of a year. Now Mouse decides to visit a seaside friend. He boards a small red rowboat and, waved off by several anthropomorphic animal pals (one wears a dress; Mouse and other friends sport trousers), sets out from the wood, down the lazy river on a sunny summer day. A map tracing Mouse’s journey can be found on the frontispiece. As in the earlier book, the action is minimal; the appeal is in the minutely detailed objects on the winding shores: boating equipment, homes, plants, and animals. Movable flaps allow readers a glimpse at the well-stocked interiors of a boathouse studio, a houseboat, stores, and other places as Mouse drifts by. Mouse and the other small critters are cut from the same cloth as the characters in Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series; Melvin’s sketchier style makes them scruffier cousins of Beatrix Potter’s creations. Modest quatrains rock readers along as gently as the river. Multiple reads will be necessary to spot the dozens of items found throughout and inventoried on the final page (“What Mouse Packed”), let alone the many more that aren’t labeled but that will nevertheless lure an attentive eye.

Happy hours ahead on this river!