Bless This Mouse - Softcover

Dear Amazon Readers:

Here is how it started. Out of the corner of my eye, while I was hard at work one day, I saw something move. A little scurrying motion. It wasn’t my dog, Alfie, who was curled up and snoozing by my feet. But I was quite certain I had seen something. I went to look, and found a mouse.

Though I am not the kind of timid female who shrieks "Eeek!" and jumps up into a chair, I am not fond of mice. They come in from the meadows around my Maine farmhouse when the weather gets cold. They move stuff around—once I found French lentils in my ski boots. They make little nests of shredded cashmere sweaters. They gnaw their way into my pantry. I have been known to set traps for them and then to dispose of them—and their traps—without a shred of remorse.

But this mouse was quite different. He had very large eyes and ears. They made him appear—well, cute. He seemed, actually, to have a personality, and he was completely unafraid of me. Finally, not knowing exactly how to behave with such a creature, I picked him up, talked to him a bit about how he would be happier living outdoors, and then I carried him out to my garden and gently placed him on the ground beside the birdbath. I told him that I hoped he would have a pleasant summer. Alfie took one last close-up look at him and lost interest. Then I went back into the house and to my unfinished manuscript.

But I found myself suddenly bored by my fictional humans. I could only think about mice. I started typing. I created a mouse, and then another, and another. I gave them names and personalities and problems and relationships, and before I knew it I had written an entire book about them. I called it Bless This Mouse.

(But when I went out to tell him about it, he was gone.)

Lois Lowry is the author of more than forty books for children and young adults, including the New York Times bestselling Giver Quartet and popular Anastasia Krupnik series. She has received countless honors, among them the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader’s Medal, and the Mark Twain Award. She received Newbery Medals for two of her novels, Number the Stars and The Giver. Her first novel, A Summer to Die, was awarded the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award. Ms. Lowry lives in Maine.
www.loislowry.com 
Twitter @LoisLowryWriter