By Peter W. Barnes, Cheryl Shaw Barnes
How a bill becomes a law, done properly and in full, by mice in waistcoats in a scale model of the Capitol.
Miss Tuftmore's second-grade class in Moussouri writes to Congress with an idea: there should be a law naming a National Cheese. That request goes to the Squeaker of the House and the Senate Mouse-jority Leader, and the book then follows it through every stage a real bill actually goes through. It's drafted. It's introduced. It goes to committee, and the committee holds hearings and pulls it about. Both chambers debate it and change it, and then the two different versions have to be reconciled into one, which is the step every other book at this age drops. Both chambers vote. The President signs. Cheryl Barnes trained as an architect and it shows — the Capitol is drawn to the real building, room by room, with mice in it. The whole thing is in rhyming couplets, and there's a section at the back called The Tail End with material for teachers.
Be clear about what you're getting, because the honest description is also the recommendation. The verse is functional. The couplets are here to carry the procedure, not because anybody had a poem in them, and the rhymes get bent to fit words like 'amendment'. A child who dislikes being taught in rhyme will not be talked round by these rhymes. What the book has is the civics, and the civics are good: the bill goes through the real stages in the real order, including the conference between the two chambers, which is the step that actually kills bills and which almost nothing else at this age bothers to mention. The pictures are the other half. The building is accurate, so a child pores over the rooms, and the pull of the book is that a mouse is doing this in a place that exists. Take it for what it teaches and let the rhyme be the delivery van.