If You Take a Mouse to the Movies
What I would call “derivative books” or books that follow the same pattern or structure as what is often a very successful first book, usually with the same characters, are hard to do well. Often, they lose the uniqueness, the originality, the newness, of what made the first book successful.
There are a lot of “If You Take A…” or “If You Give A…” books written by Laura Numeroff. Originally, I wanted to say read the first, and skip the rest, but the different versions can all be entertaining to little ones.
This story is technically a Christmas story. Which makes sense with the popcorn, but honestly, there’s no indication of it being a Christmas story until you read it, and the first question it brought up is what happens if you take a mouse to the movies in the summer?? The logic in this one doesn’t always make sense, including the circle back to the movies at the end, but it is still entertaining enough for little ones.
Cautions: The only cautions I encountered are dependent on the audience and what type of questions they tend to ask. When we go through this book my little one tends to ask a lot of “why?” questions in response to the mouse’s desires or more specifically why one choice leads to the next desire.
