The Outermost Mouse

With compassionate prose, haunting artwork, and an open, mythic ending, Newbery Honoree Wolk, making her picture book debut, and Adam (The Urban Owls) capture what it means to face a literal sea change. A brown mouse “in love with her life” shares with an old man the Outermost House, a ramshackle cabin perched on a beach “where the land slipped away.” Nature provides for the mouse’s needs, and the house supplies creature comforts, including a clock that “tick-tocked her to sleep at night.” But the waters are rising nearer the residence, and while other animals prove unconcerned and the house itself seems resigned to its fate, the mouse attempts to build rodent-size defenses. When the human owner finally abandons the abode, the ocean rushes in, and sweeping digitally finished watercolors turn genuinely frightening as the mouse, clinging to a post, is enveloped in stormy darkness. Then realism gives way to legend: the protagonist lashes her tail to the porch—now her prow—and standing with hands on hips, heads into open waters, “the sea itself singing her name as she joined the ranks of captains everywhere.” The creators acknowledge real loss—climate change, displacement, homes that can’t be saved. But they also offer young readers navigating their own “outermost” futures a path forward, defined by courage and a sense of adventure. An author’s note concludes. Ages 4–8. (May)