Artist-rendered display type ranges from a protracted “RRROAARRRRRRRRR” to nine petite squeaks from as many mouselings. Spreads in watercolor and pencil employ a palette of glowing amber, mouse-brown and blue-green. Mouse, befitting her courage, is often depicted heroically large relative to Lion.

He plays, too, with perspective, alternating foreground views of Mouse amid tall grasses with layered panoramas of the Serengeti plain and its multitudinous wildlife. Pinkney successfully blends anthropomorphism and realism, depicting Lion’s massive paws and Mouse’s pink inner ears along with expressions encompassing the quizzical, hapless and nearly smiling. Lion releases Mouse in a moment of bemused gentility and-when subsequently ensnared in a poacher’s rope trap-reaps the benefit thereof. I never knew if that 'welcome' sign included my parents, uncles, aunts, and the black adults who were our neighbors, teachers, and pastors - those very individuals who tried their best to instill a sense of self worth in us.A nearly wordless exploration of Aesop’s fable of symbiotic mercy that is nothing short of masterful.Ī mouse, narrowly escaping an owl at dawn, skitters up what prove to be a male lion’s tail and back. Stores did not have any 'whites only' signs posted, but the 'open' sign on the door didn't always mean that my friends and I really could enter and be served.

'In the 1940s, Philly was not as plainly segregated as many of the Southern states, but there was still often an implied separation of the races - limitations on where we could go, things we could do, who we could talk to. Our country was still recovering from the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression was finally ending, and World War II was just beginning,' Pinkney wrote in a 2016 essay for WHYY - which you can find here. Growing up in the 1940s, I was also smack in the middle of another turbulent era in American history. 'I was born in 1939, smack in the middle of a family of eight. Pinkney also frequently collaborated with his wife, Gloria Jean, a children's book author. And millennials will remember the numerous books by Julius Lester that he illustrated, including John Henry and The Last Tales of Uncle Remus. Taylor's novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cryin 1977.

Gen X readers will remember Pinkney's covers for Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown from 1971 and Mildred D.

The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney