Caldecott Monday: Once a Mouse

The cover on Marcia Brown's Once a Mouse doesn't really do justice to the book: it's a quiet, static picture, and the illustrations in the book are full of tension and movement. A hermit saves a mouse from a crow, only for it to be threatened by a cat - so he turns the mouse into a cat, and then a dog, and at last into a tiger, at which point the mouse-turned-tiger becomes extremely vain of its stripes and its size.

I think there's a message here about remembering your roots and/or the people who helped you along the way: no one turns into a tiger all on their own.

Anyway. I particularly like the scene where he turns the mouse into a tiger: he's got his arms stretched wide, the tiger appearing beneath them, and the other tiger is cowering away at the side.