Mary and the Mouse, the Mouse and Mary Review

Schwartz & Wade Books

I adore McClintock's signature vintage style. She captures period details without cluttering her compositions; she maintains an almost Renaissance-like sense of perspective and her watercolor palette is softly understated, her brushstrokes nearly invisible.

Any book with McClintock as its illustrator announces itself as a Big Deal; clearly the publisher means it as a stand-out. And this is before I read the press release about Donofrio, a bestselling author who's turning her hand to kiddie lit.

Is Donofrio up to the task of writing a kids' book? Is she worthy of McClintock? Or is this just another ploy by a blockbuster-obsessed publisher?

The story starts innocuously enough. Mouse lives in Mary's house leading parallel lives; a fact they discover one day by accident. They arrange for more "accidents" to wave hello, but never actually meet. When Mary grows up and gets a house of her own, Mouse ends up in the same house, and it's left to their daughters -- who repeat the cycle of parallel lives -- to actually cross the room and greet each other.

McClintock smartly picks up on a mid-Century sensibility in Mary and Mouse's inability to make a final break from rigid stereotypes: Mice "have fleas and germs" while people are "sneaky and mean." Mary's poodle skirt gives way to hippy garb and a VW Beetle; later her new home is mid-70s glass-and-flagstone Modern. But neither character sheds that last vestige of an uptight upbringing.

The daughters -- Maria and Mouse Mouse -- are straight out of the pink-backpack '80s as McClintock's drawn them, and it's impossible to avoid a Civil Rights meta-message subtly imbued in its soothing hues and busying details. If Mary and Mouse take us to the edge of they're-just-like-us acceptance, the next generation can make the daring step of crossing any remaining boundaries.

It's a soothing message, but it seems aimed more at nostalgic parents than kids. Let's congratulate ourselves retroactively for supporting Mouse Rights, eh? For our kids, however, it's hard to explain why the story doesn't remain about Mary and the Mouse, despite the title, which creates some major loose ends and no arc at all for the main characters, who grow older but never wiser and then disappear altogether.