Mouse & Tim

by Faith McNulty

A young boy and a young deer mouse recount the four months they spent together after the boy found the tiny creature in the barn

Genres: Picture Books, Childrens

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Faith McNulty was an American nonfiction author, probably best-known for her 1980 book The Burning Bed. She was born "Faith Corrigan" in New York City, the daughter of a judge. Young Faith attended Barnard College for one year, then attended Rhode Island State College. But she dropped out of college once she got a job as a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She later went to work for Life magazine. She worked for the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II.

McNulty was a wildlife writer at The New Yorker magazine for several years. In 1980, a collection of her New Yorker work was published as The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty. For many years, she edited the annual New Yorker compilation of the year's best children's books.

She also frequently wrote children's books on wildlife, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World in 1979 and When I Lived with Bats in 1998. Her 1966 book The Whooping Crane: The Bird that Defies Distinction was written for adults.

Her husband, John McNulty, was also a writer for The New Yorker and with Thomas Wolf, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, a major figure in the development of the literary genre of creative nonfiction, which is also known as literary journalism or literature in fact. After her husband died in 1956, she remarried, to Richard Martin, a set designer and an inventive designer of set props.

The Burning Bed told the true story of Francine Hughes, who set fire to the bedroom in which her husband was sleeping. Hughes defended herself by saying that her husband had been abusing her for 13 years. The jury at her trial ruled that she had been temporarily insane, and she was found not guilty.

"I can remember my father in his nightshirt, digging for worms for the baby robin in the bathroom. That's the kind of household it was; I had woodchucks in the bathroom, cats, squirrels, chipmunks," McNulty once said.

Toward the end of her life, she wrote a weekly column for The Providence Journal on a local animal shelter run by the Animal Welfare League. Her mother had founded the Animal Welfare League in southern Rhode Island. McNulty had long been known for taking in stray animals at her farm.

She suffered a stroke in 2004. She died at her farm in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

Reviews

[Imaginarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mouse And Tim is a tender story about about friendship between a boy and his barn mouse. The story is told through two points of view- the boy's and the mouse's. The eternal charm of this book lies in the different ways each being perceives the same world.

For a child, this book would demonstrate how to have empathy for another being by trying to see from someone else's point of view. As well, children would learn that although we are not all the same, we can still develop deep, meaningful connections with each other.

This was my first favourite book as a child. Through the years, this book has managed to both touch and haunt me with each read.

On a personal note, my family experienced a house fire when I was a teenager- and this book was one of the very few items I pulled from the rubble, as I could not part with it, regardless of the charred and water-damaged pages.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book in a Little Free Library and after reading just a few pages, I fell in love completely. The messages about different creatures having different perspectives are great, as are the ways that those perspectives are shown and respected. Tim at one point wonders how Mouse could seem to know him and understand him, even though Mouse is so tiny. Then he thinks about how a grandfather clock and a watch are very different sizes, but both tell time.
This book is about two friends of different species and it is absolutely lovely.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tender story about a baby mouse whose mother and siblings are all thrown accidentally into the trash, leaving Mouse alone in the world. When a boy named Tim finds him he takes him in and keeps him as a pet, only to have to face the day when he must part ways and let Mouse be free again in an unsuspecting world. I loved this story and the illustrations. Told from both sides, Mouse and Tim, and how each reacts to the same situations, but from different perspectives. My rating - 5/5

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short children's story of a young boy who finds a mouse and takes care of her, told from both the perspective of the boy and the mouse.
When the boy prepares the mouse for living in the wild again and sets her free, I feel emotional every time.