A Book of Mice

Pictures of mice, poems about mice, nursery rhymes, fables and fantasies, this slim but plumply packed collection is a muridaphile's cornucopia. I particularly enjoyed Joan Aiken's haunting whimsy about piano-playing mice mourning the theft of the moon, while my young listeners were delighted by Anon's extended version of 'Three Blind Mice', in which the atrocity committed by the farmer's wife is set within a pilgrimage of discovery. This is an enormously entertaining book for such a minuscule subject, its one and only weakness being a type size that would make even the most literate mouse squint.