GRRRR!!! Oops!

By ROGER SUTTON

THE LION AND THE MOUSE

Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

Unpaged. Little, Brown & Company Books for Young Readers. $16.99. (Ages 3 to 6)

The art of Jerry Pinkney’s new picture book is commanding enough to do without the author’s name or even the title on the front cover. A jacket with no words at all? It’s been done before, but not often — probably most notably with Fred Marcellino’s “Puss in Boots” (1990), which won a Caldecott Honor. That cover featured a big cat, too, but here Pinkney gives us a lion’s head with a magnificent mane, filling the entire frame. The Sun King demeanor is somewhat diminished by the uneasy glance the lion is casting stage right, toward the back cover, where a mouse looks up with a question in its eye. Which creature will be the hero of the tale within?

This is Pinkney’s second go at “The Lion and the Mouse,” the first being a brief entry in his “Aesop’s Fables” of almost 20 years ago. But that first pair were only supporting players to Aesop’s text, 200 or so words plus a moral: “Even the strongest can sometimes use the help of the smallest.” The new book has only seven distinct words, all sound effects — an owl, stalking the mouse, “whoooo” and “screeeech”; the mouse, “scratch” and “squeak.” Providing the plot is the “putt-putt-putt” of the jeep bearing humans into the Serengeti landscape (a note says).

And you don’t even need the sounds to see exactly what’s going on. Wordless picture books require great cunning not only to provide a recognizable pantomime but also to lead readers from one scene to the next: how do you know when to turn the page when there are no words to pull you forward? Pinkney’s story begins with a mouse pausing alertly in —what is this? — a big paw print in the sandy ground, one of a set tracking across the title-page spread. We turn the page, dawn is (beautifully) breaking, the mouse is poised, apparently listening. . . . Good thing there is a hole in that fallen tree on the far right, because on the next page the mouse barely dives in when the owl swoops. The mouse moves on, coming to rest on — “Is that a snake?” asked the 4-year-old I was sharing the book with. Pinkney’s sly use of nature’s camouflage causes us to look more closely. Nope: it was a tail, then a furry back, and before you know it the lion has the mouse by its tail, his “GRRR” seeming more puzzled than threatening, the mouse’s squeak an “Oops!”

Winner of five Caldecott Honors, Pinkney has always seemed happier drawing animals than people. Look, in his 2007 retelling, at his studied Little Red Riding Hood next to his lively Wolf. His beasts are not humans in disguise; while both the lion and the mouse have emotions and intelligence in their eyes, they are animal in nature. We don’t know why the lion lets the mouse go free or why the mouse nibbles the lion out of the net planted by the men (poachers? wardens?) from the jeep. But it’s actions in this case that count. That’s the moral of the story.

Roger Sutton is editor in chief of The Horn Book Magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Sutton-t.html