From Publishers Weekly
In a memorable picture-book debut recalling both the golden age of children's illustration and contemporary artists like Jim LaMarche, Forman contributes luminous, finely detailed illustrations to Hoberman's (A House Is a House for Me) sprightly variation on a tried-and-true tale. Achieving an antique effect using pencils and watercolors, the artist portrays a small town of yesteryear whose streets are overrun by a quickly multiplying throng of mice. Young readers will gleefully spot these unwanted visitors in the most unlikely places: peeking out of pockets, perched atop buildings, darting up a pant leg. Lengthy rhyming stanzas (which intermittently address readers as "sir") explain the townfolks' reaction: "I tell you, sir, it was not nice. This town was soon as warm with mice. You need not look but once or twice To see them frisk and frolic Till not a single store or house Was uninvaded by a mouse And every husband and his spouse Was rendered melancholic." Enter the Pied Piper-like savior, shown as a gangly old gent wearing a stovepipe hat and crimson cape, who entices the mice to follow him not with music but with an odor of intrinsic appeal to the persistent pests: "Some said it smelled of Brie from France, While others swore 'twas Liederkranz Or Gorgonzola, ripe, perchance, Or Stilton, Swiss, or Edam." Hoberman's agile and comical verse cleverly contorts a classic and adds a second star: an appealing young heroine. Yet it is Forman's art, at once inventive and nostalgic, that makes this a book to savor. Ages 5-8.
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