By Jerry Pinkney
The old fable of the tiny mouse who saves the mighty lion, told almost entirely in gorgeous painted pictures of the African plains, so a child can read the whole story by looking.
You already know the story, and that's part of why it works. A little mouse, fleeing an owl, blunders across a sleeping lion and wakes him. The lion could eat her in a blink, and holds her in his great paw, and then lets her go. Later, the lion is caught in a poacher's rope net, roaring and helpless, and the little mouse he spared comes back and gnaws through the ropes until he's free. Jerry Pinkney tells the whole thing in enormous, sun-warmed paintings of the Serengeti, with almost no words at all, just the odd animal sound, an owl's screech, the scritch of teeth on rope. Your child reads the kindness and the rescue straight from the faces and the action.
Your child won't read text, so this hands them a story they can follow completely, because the pictures are so clear and so full of feeling that the plot is right there on every face. It's also a real, whole fable, a lesson about kindness coming back around, that a young child can grasp without a word of moralizing, because they watched it happen. The paintings are stunning enough to hold even a squirmy child, and the story is short and satisfying, a gentle, dignified pick that won the Caldecott Medal for how much it says with so little text.