By Peter W. Barnes, Cheryl Shaw Barnes
A mouse wins the presidency, moves into the White House, and takes your child through every room of it.
Woodrow G. Washingtail has been elected President of the United Mice of America, and the book moves in with him and his family. First the inauguration and the oath, then the job itself, laid out plainly: he signs bills, or he vetoes them; he meets other countries' leaders; he commands the armed forces; he appoints people to run things. Then it walks the house. The Oval Office. The Cabinet Room. The Situation Room. The East Wing and the West Wing. A state dinner. The Easter egg roll on the lawn. Cheryl Barnes trained as an architect and drew the real rooms accurately, so every spread is a place that exists, with mice in it. Rhyming couplets throughout, thirty-two pages, and the publisher pitches it at about five to eight.
This is the tour, and it's the best-selling of the three mouse books for a plain reason: a great many children want to see inside the White House and there is very little at this age that shows them. The rooms are the draw. They're accurate, they're cut away so a child can see through the walls, and teachers use the book as the visit they can't take. Be honest about the limits, though. Of the three this one is the loosest on mechanism — it shows what a President does far better than it explains how the office is held in check, so a child finishes it knowing the job and the building rather than the constitutional argument, which the Congress book and the Court book handle much better. And it's a tour rather than a story, so whether it holds depends on whether your child wants the place. The verse is the same as the rest of the series: functional couplets carrying the facts, doing a job. If rhyme irritates your child, nothing here will fix that.