f You Give a Mouse a Cookie is an American children's picture book, written by Laura Joffe Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond and first published in 1985 by Harper and Row. It is a slippery slope told in a circular story,[1] and the first in a series of stories that became known as the If You Give... series, an early collaboration between Numeroff and Bond.
The whole story narration takes the second person narrative. Boy feeds a mouse, Frank with a cookie. Then the mouse requests a glass of milk. He continues to order a straw (to drink the milk), a napkin followed by a mirror (lest he have a milk mustache), nail scissors (because he wants to cut his hair with the mirror), and a broom (to clean up his hair shavings). Then he makes the boy give him a blanket to take his nap, reads him a story, hands him crayons and paper to draw him a picture, and then nails the picture to the refrigerator. He is thirsty when he sees the refrigerator, so the mouse wants the second glass of milk. The circle is complete where he desires a cookie to accompany it.[3].
Art
Based on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
Illustrator Felicia Bond interpreted the text to depict the growing energy of the mouse, and by the story's conclusion, the little boy was left run ragged. School Library Journal lauded the appearance of the art, noting its "obsessive precision of detail,"[1] and was created in rich color with a mixture of pencil in a complicated mechanism of overprinting magenta, cyan, yellow, and black on individual sheets and assembled in printing.
Bond explains that she was in a hurry to finish the sketches and leave town with her boyfriend and that the energy of the mouse was based on that excitement. She has actually stated on many occasions that the little boy in the book was her boyfriend, Stephen Roxborough, when she was a kid.
Awards & recognition
Though it won several awards after its release, including the Alabama Camellia Children's Choice Book Award (1986-87),[4] Georgia Children's Book Award (1988),[5] Nevada Young Readers' Award (1989),[6] California Young Reader Medal (1988),[7] Colorado Children's Book Award (1988).[8]
It also received a nomination in the Nebraska Golden Sower Award in 1987, the Washington Children Choice Picture Book Award and the Kentucky Bluegrass Award in 1988, and the Grand Canyon Reader Award in 1989[8].
In 2006, Numeroff was awarded the Milner Award in recognition of her contribution to the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In 2015, the book was added to the Picture Book Hall of Fame[8].
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