Title: Once a Mouse...
Author: Marcia Brown
Genre: Children's / India / Animals / Gratitude / Folktale
Year Published: 1961
Year Read: 1997 (Re Read: 2018)
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
Source: Purchased
Content Rating: Ages 5+ (Some Intense Situations)
Buy on: Amazon // Book Depository
*Original Rating: 4 stars*
*Rating Now: 5 stars*
Now, I had read Marcia
Brown’s retelling of the ancient Indian folktale “Once a Mouse…” many years ago and I had actually written a review
for it years ago (some of my thoughts in the original review will be restated
in this all new review)! So, I decided
to read this book again after all of these years to see if I still felt the
same way I did years ago and surprisingly enough, I found out that I liked this
book better the second time around than I did the first time (which is so
awesome)!
The story started off with a wise old hermit thinking
about big and little, when suddenly, he sees a mouse being chased by a crow and
he ends up saving the mouse from the crow.
From then on, the hermit started taking care of the mouse until a cat
came into the clearing and was about to eat the mouse until the hermit changed
the mouse into an even bigger cat. Afterwards, the mouse kept getting
threatened with a bigger animal until the hermit finally transformed the mouse
into a tiger and the tiger, who was once a mouse, starts taking advantage of
its huge size.
What
will the hermit do with the tiger now?
Read
this book to find out!
Marcia
Brown had done an excellent job with both writing and
illustrating this ancient tale from India.
I loved the way that Marcia Brown
made this story so dramatic, especially since I was sitting on the edge of my
seat trying to see if the mouse will survive in the forest with all of the
dangers such as a cat, a dog and a tiger, threatening it. I also loved the fact that Marcia Brown tackled the importance of
being grateful to the people who helped you as it provides a great lesson for children
to learn about being thankful to the people who have helped them out of a dangerous
or complicated situation. Marcia Brown’s illustrations are creative
and rough-edged as the characters have jagged limbs and the coloring that is
the most prevalent in this book are red, black, white and brown which creates a
traditional atmosphere to this story.
The only problem I had with this book was that the
narrative was a bit of a struggle to get through because the sentences were
broken up, meaning that one half of the sentence would be on one page and the other
half of the sentence continues onto the next page. This can be extremely confusing for smaller
children who are reading this book and parents might want to help their children
read through this book to help their children understand the book much better.
Overall, “Once a Mouse”
is a truly wonderful tale about how it is important to show gratitude towards
someone who has helped you get out of a sticky situation, or in this case, four
sticky situations! This book will surely
become a great classic for children who are interested in Indian culture. I would recommend this book to children ages
five and up since the sentence structure might be a bit too difficult for
smaller children to read through.
* 1962 Caldecott Medal
* 1966 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
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