Cat and Mice

Cat and Mice

By: Debby Slier
Illustrator: Pat Schories
PAPERBACK AVAILABLE
ISBN: 978-1-59572-973-6

This clever cat and mouse mouse adventure story is told in simple sentences. The words are playful, easy to read, and fun to sound out, making the book perfect for beginning readers.

School Library Journal: …one in a small category of very beginning reader texts that manages to communicate an interesting plot in fewer than 20 unique words.

Squeak the Mouse Likes His House

Squeak the Mouse Likes His House

An "I Like to Read" book by Pat Schories
published by Holiday House

Picture-book readers will delight in finding the mouse on each spread. Pat Schories' gentle humor and quick and clever mouse, should prove equally enduring and effective as both story and reading lesson.

Kirkus Reviews -This simple early reader explores all the things Squeak likes in his house, in the kitchen of a (mostly) unsuspecting human family.

Schories' visual humor makes this slight story of just 18 words into a satisfying and complete adventure. New readers will gain confidence as Squeak navigates his house and words are repeated using the same sentence pattern introduced in the title. The only change is in the article-adjective-noun phrases that provide details of how the mouse uses familiar objects, toys, shoes, the dog's water bowl, and snacks, provided by the unsuspecting humans who share his house. The proximity of the mouse to two young children and a dog, all oblivious to the mouse' s activities, lends an air of daring and suspense to the mouse's explorations of their shared home. Interjection of the mouse's "Squeak" as he scurries about the kitchen and the chaos produced when one of the children (both present white) trips and spills her snack of nuts and raisins add both humor and excitement. Picture-book readers will delight in finding the mouse on each spread. Schories' gentle humor and quick, clever mouse reminiscent of Arnold Lobel's classic Mouse Tales (1972) should prove equally enduring and effective as both story and reading lesson.

Pie for Chuck cover

Pie for Chuck

An "I Like to Read" book by Pat Schories
published by Holiday House

Big Chuck is a woodchuck with a taste for pie. He daydreams about warm, flaky pastries and their fruity filling. When he spots a freshly baked blueberry pie cooling on the windowsill, he must have it.

Kirkus Reviews -This short, cheerful tale of cooperation from Schories features engaging artwork and animal protagonists, and it operates on a very approachable level for beginning readers: "Big Chuck loves pie. // Big Chuck can see the pie. // Big Chuck can smell the pie." (That covers six pages.) The letters are big and welcoming, and the norm is three to four words per sentence, with the occasional stretch to a James Joyce an seven. It is not just Big Chuck (a very large woodchuck, as his name suggests) the pie has attracted, but an assortment of rural chums. Trouble is, none can reach the pie by itself. Even working in concert, standing on one another's shoulders, "Can the mice get the pie? No, they cannot!" In a spontaneous act of interspecies cooperation, Big Chuck hoists the mice on his head, and the pie comes tumbling down. "Pie for everyone!", though the pie makers may not agree. (It's blueberry, by the way, and Schories has drawn its warm, blue gooiness just right; it's irresistible, even lying in the dirt.) The words have pure drive to them, and the repetition calls forth an incantatory urge to speak the words out loud.

Fine for a read-alone but like dynamite for a read-aloud. (Picture book. 4-8)

Pants for Chuck cover

Pants for Chuck

an "I Like to Read" book by Pat Schories
published by Holiday House

Big Chuck, a woodchuck, is having fun with Rabbit, Raccoon, Chipmunk and the mice brothers when he spots a pair of blue pants. Chuck must have the pants. He holds up the game while he struggles to put them on. "You are too big and the pants are too small," his friends tell him, but Chuck thinks he looks spiffy. Sidesplitting illustrations show a determined Chuck, stuffed into his much-too-tiny blue pants trying in vain to keep up. Comfort and fun finally trump fashion as Chuck sheds the pants and joins the gang for a game of hide and seek. Pat Schories's comic illustrations turn a stubborn woodchuck's misguided fashion statement into a laugh-aloud story about self-image and the well-intended advice of true friends.

Forest, what would you like?  cover

Forest, what would you like?

by Irene O'Garden
illustrated by Pat Schories
published by Holiday House

In this heartfelt poem, the forest announces its wish-list for every season,including sun, mice, and a slug in summer; fruit, song, and spicy smells in the fall; snow, an icy river, and maple sugar in winter; and rain, moist soil, and flowers in spring.

Kirkus Reviews - Performer and poet O'Garden's jubilant dialogue between sweet-natured children and a personified forest offers an apt blend of lush imagery and bare-bones kid-ness, set to a read-aloud rhythm. On the book's final page, O'Garden's author's note explains how the idea for the book blossomed in Garrison, N.Y. "Gowned as Mother Nature, I asked each child to tell me how the forest might answer the question: Forest, what would you like? From their four hundred responses, to which I added answers of my own, I distilled a ten-page poem," melding the voices of the children with her own. The effect is a seamless grassy green ribbon of fun with flora and fauna. "Forest, what would you like? / I would like friendship, fruit, song, / and all the spicy smells of Fall: / acorns, seeds, and crispy needles. / I would like my leaves to turn different colors / and a whole bunch of birds to fly through me." Schories expertly captures the conversation between children and nature. She sets the forest scenes in large, full-bleed panels that occupy whole pages or most of a spread, representing the children's voices with a multiethnic group of tots who populate the white space. A green-clad, elfin child personifies the forest, romping in the trees or sitting contemplatively by a wintry river. It is poetry set to the life cycle of nature--through the words of children. (Picture book. 3-7)

Mouse Around cover

Mouse Around

by Pat Schories
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

An adventurous mouse finds his way back home after falling out of his nest.

Schories' pictures tell a story with several diverting subplots effectively and with great charm - Publisher's Weekly

There's plenty to discover and discuss in this carefully devised story...an unusually strong debut - Kirkus Reviews

Over Under In the Garden

Over Under In The Garden

A Botanical Alphabet book by Pat Schories
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

In lushly detailed paintings, alphabet and garden are woven together from A to Z. With a little help from an industrious chipmunk, children and gardeners of all ages will enjoy discovering the plants, insects and animals of this beautiful garden.

Outstanding Science Trade book for Children for 1997 Children's Book Council National Science Teachers Association

Winter Barn

Winter Barn

by Dorothy Ripley illustrated by Pat Schories
published by Random House

Snow covers the farm, but the animals are comfortable in the barn where the Farmer tends them.

Heís Your Dog! cover

He's Your Dog!

by Pat Schories
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

When a dog chews one shoe too many, his young owner decides they will run away from home. But the more he plans, the more he realizes that the answer may be as near as the sneakers on his feet.

Teeny Tiny Mouse, a Book About Colors cover

Teeny Tiny Mouse, a Book About Colors

by Laura Leuck, illustrated by Pat Schories
published by BridgeWater Books

"Can you name some colors in our teeny tiny house?" said the teeny, tiny mommy to the teeny, tiny mouse.