In a retelling of one of the world’s best-known stories, famed illustrator Nancy Ekholm Burkert (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” “James and the Giant Peach”) works for the first time with her son Rand Burkert to produce Mouse & Lion (Scholastic, Inc., 32 pp.). Jerry Pinkney’s award-winning 2009 rendition of the Aesop’s fable of the lion who spares the mouse – who later saves the lion – may have seemed definitive two years ago, but in 2011 the Burkerts prove that there is still plenty of room for a new treatment of this timeless tale. In their spare and lovely watercolor version, the tiny mice of the Aha Hills are a particular delight – and ounce for ounce they exhibit full as much personality and individuality as the mighty lion of the Kalahari.
