Pip: The Adventures of a Deer Mouse

Susan Brown is a B.C. horticulturist, permaculture designer, and early
childhood education instructor.

This early chapter novel for 6- to 10-year-olds portrays the natural
history of Canada’s East Coast “through the eyes of a deer mouse.”
The life of a deer mouse, we learn, is one perilous situation after
another; thus, the story line is one of excitement and constant change.

The natural history goes deeper than in most kid’s books. This is not
just one person’s view of what it might be like to be a deer mouse.
The information on snow, for instance, is taken from a body of
scientific knowledge about snow and rodents and introduced unobtrusively
into the story. The interrelationships between deer mice and other
animals, including other rodents, are similarly rooted in current
science. Unfortunately, while the events are instructive re-creations of
a deer mouse’s life, the emotional stream of consciousness attributed
to Pip is all too anthropomorphic.

The black-and-white woodcut-style drawings by wildlife artist Bruce
Wood seem appropriately in the tradition of natural-history
illustration, showing the animal characters in an entirely realistic
way.

This is a well-tailored book; its basic-brown cover depicts an
attractive pencil-crayoned night scene. The 10-year-old on whom I tested
the novel took two evenings to read it, but kept at it, steadily finding
intrinsic interest.