If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Plot

A boy gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings). Next he wants to take a nap, have a story read to him, draw a picture, and hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.

Origin

Author Laura Numeroff has often said in interviews that the idea for the story came to her during a long car trip she took with a friend from San Francisco to Oregon. She narrated it as they drove and later wrote it down. The manuscript was passed over by nine publishers before being taken on by Laura Gerringer, a publisher under the Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) imprint, who immediately thought of Felicia Bond to illustrate it.

Art

The text was interpreted by illustrator Felicia Bond to show the increasing energy of the mouse, with the little boy being run ragged by the end of the story. The art was praised by School Library Journal for its "meticulous attention to detail", and was executed with vibrant colors of blended pencil in a complex process of layering magenta, cyan, yellow, and black on separate sheets, which were then assembled during printing.

Bond describes rushing to get the sketches done before leaving town with her boyfriend and that the energy of the mouse evolved from that excitement. She has mentioned on numerous occasions that the little boy in the book was her boyfriend, Stephen Roxburgh, as a child.

Popular culture

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie quickly became established as a popular favorite and is today considered a contemporary classic. A series of sixteen titles followed. They have been translated into more than thirteen languages. The If You Give... series has garnered numerous awards, and their popularity is witnessed by their consistent presence on The New York Times Best Seller List.

Charles Schulz created two Peanuts strips about If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and in 2000 Oprah Winfrey chose If You Give a Pig a Pancake as one of her favorite things in 2000. She also included it on her list Oprah’s Favorite Things from A-Z in that same year. "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" was the answer to a question on Jeopardy!. The books have been adapted into plays for children's theaters. The Bronx Zoo in New York featured the art in their Children's Zoo for one year and the artwork has been used to create murals in the wings of children's hospitals. The series has fans of all ages from all over the world including Japan, where an entire Tokyo city bus was painted with images of Mouse. Mouse also made it to the White House; in Laura Bush's Celebration of American Authors at the 2001 Presidential Inauguration Felicia Bond and Laura Numeroff were among those honored for their If You Give... series, and the former First Lady writes that the Bush family cat India's favorite book was If You Take a Mouse to the Movies. A bronze sculpture of her sleeping on the book is included in the George W. Bush Presidential Library. First Lady Michelle Obama read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie on the White House lawn during the 2009 Easter Egg Roll.

Mouse's popularity inspired many subsequent books, and an animated adaptation by Amazon in 2015.

If You Give... series

Compilations

Series awards

The book series was also awarded an Honoree "Laura Bush Celebrates American Authors" in 2001 plus Presidential Inauguration "NEA Teacher’s Picks Books to Read Across America" in 1999.

Selected translations

Adaptations

A pilot for a potential streaming series was created by Amazon Studios.