A Delicious Story, happily zips along with charm to spare

This is a thick illustrated book. That’s what you’ll be thinking when you first pick up A Delicious Story. This is a lot of pages it’s probably quite a delicious story indeed. Yes, it is, but open up the book and you’ll see artwork that is the hallmark of Barney Saltzberg. The cartoonish mice are drawn with big, thick lines and have been lovingly painted to illustrate the difference between the baby mouse and the adult mouse. His art and stories always have a muted allure of a slow, patient tale that’s able to pivot to a quick reveal, twist, or surprise that leaves young readers smiling.

A Delicious Story is a very patient one indeed. It also breaks the wall that exists between the book and the reader in a way that will remind those older folks of some of the great books before it. A little mouse walks up to a bigger, older mouse and says that he’s looking for a story. Apparently, there was a fabulous story in the book, but it was one that was so delicious that the older mouse ate it all up. The younger mouse knows that it’s in a book, and simply wants a story.

If the older mouse ate the story then surely it could recreate the one it consumed, right? It’s not that easy. They don’t have any ideas and the little mouse is displaying all of the patience that one could expect from a pre-k to early elementary student who just wants a story.

Older readers, the ones reading this read-aloud book, will subconsciously align A Delicious Story to the Seinfeld episode that they never saw. This is a book, about a book and a story that’s in search of a story to tell this very inquisitive and cute young mouse. It’s a very simple story, with only dialogue and a mouse or two on most of the pages.

That’s the greatness of Saltzberg’s work, it is deceivingly simple. A Delicious Story doesn’t have many moving parts, yet it zooms with enthusiasm and gets those young ages thinking about what’s on the pages in front of them. It also encourages them to think and to question what’s happening in the story when the pages of the book don’t tell you. For example, there are some pages where the opposing mice are further apart from one another and others where the elder mouse isn’t there at all. It’s a simple book, but it moves with wit, charm, and a timeless sense that many other illustrated books don’t have.

From cover to cover it presents kids with Easter eggs that make them want to re-read it again, just to see if they can discover something new, or to see if the ending will change. Ah, you older readers have figured out the OG wall-breaking book, the one staring Grover, that A Delicious Story might remind you of. It does do that, but this is its own cute, warm entity that today’s young readers will know as their book. They’ll keep it in their forever library and remember when their dad or mom read it to them as they’re reading it to their kids in 30 years.

A Delicious Story is by Barney Saltzberg and is available on Hippo Park, an imprint of Astra Books for Young Readers.

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