First, my grandson Titus says he likes the author’s name. (To avoid confusion, I will refer to my grandson as simply Titus, and the author as Eve Titus.)
Titus says Anatole is a fun story about a Parisian mouse Anatole. Anatole, his friends and family all wear clothes, speak in complete sentences, and do other things much like humans.
[Grandpa’s commentary: Titus has not learned the word “anthropomorphized” yet, but it was clearly what he was thinking.]
Anatole lives with his wife Doucette and six children Paul, Paulette, Claude, Claudette, Georges, and Georgette. Titus thought the alliterated names were cute but feared they might be perceived by French persons as American ethnocentric contrivances and might have been better as other traditional feminine French names that didn’t all end in “ette”.
Each night Anatole and his bon ami, Gaston, bicycle into the city to forage for food in human dwellings. One fateful night, Anatole overhears humans vilifying mice as horrid pests. He is shocked and hurt, and embarks on a covert mission to prove himself, and all rodentia, honorably symbiotic with human existence.
At face value, Titus found this book to be great fun. It wasn’t scary or confusing, and the illustrations by Paul Galdone were rendered quite convincingly and complementary to the story.
But Titus also found a profound message in Anatole. He felt it was a stunning indictment on cancel culture and was impressed with Eve Titus’ foresight to address the subject, albeit whimsically, in 1957.
Titus gives Anatole 4 ½ Stars (he initially said 4, but when he learned it was a favorite of his Father’s when he was Titus’ age, he gave it the extra ½ star.)
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by my Grandsons and Granddaughters click HERE
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