The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney
This book without words takes place in Africa and shows the
Aesop Fable of the lion and the mouse.
The illustrations are extremely intricate and provide details to enhance
the storyline. The African savannah is
teaming with elephants, zebras, giraffes, antelope, gazelle, gnus, and water buffaloes to name a few. The grasses and
the trees are so vivid the reader is immediately transported to the savannah
where a mouse escapes the clutches of an owl only to find itself in the claws
of a lion who decides to let it go. The
lion later gets caught in a net and is saved by the mouse who was able to chew
through the chords. At its heart the
moral of this story is that even a small creature can be a powerful friend. The story can be read by or told to any level
of reader and the level of the vocabulary can be adjusted as well as the level
of discussions generated by the theme.
The lion at first seems like a scary beast about to devour the little furry mouse but instead shows clemency and releases it. The picture on the inside of the hardback is the entire lion family walking through the tall grass with the mouse and its entire family sitting on the back or the lion. The author/illustrator doesn't waste an inch of space in the entire book and all of the title pages and back covers are full of beautiful drawings which could be stories in and of themselves. This book is so rich that each time it is read there are new things to discover and new possibilities for story details.
--Daphne Cummings
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