There's a Mouse in My House

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This funny, touching, and endearing tale is occasionally weakened by
flat spots in both the narrative and the rhymes.

A pert female mouse and a young boy are the two main characters. Their
mothers serve with offstage voices, as secondary characters. The boy’s
mother wants the mouse removed from her house. Permanently. The
mouse’s mother, who has had a hard life, encourages her uppity child
to bargain for permission to stay for the winter. The bargaining device
is stories.

While the boy stands with upraised shoe ready to end this small
storyteller’s life, the mouse tells some of her family’s four
generations of history. She also insists on being fed, or bribed, by
cheese along the way. (It is cheese that prompts the narrative flow.) As
this tiny Scheherazade gains the life of herself and her mother, the
young boy learns the power of storytelling (“She’s even taught me
how to tell / Some stories of my own / She says as long as we have
stories / We will never be alone”).

Elizabeth Watts’s illustrations are warmly sympathetic and
wonderfully imaginative. Highly recommended.