Mike's House

Mike's House is adorable. The mid-century protagonist (about six years older than I, judging by publication date) has a small child's fervent, single-minded focus on his Very Favourite Book. His library allows preschoolers one book per week, and Robert always, always, wants Mike Mulligan. And only Mike Mulligan.

Sauer has chosen a very good book to serve as the focus of her story, which is in part a homage to Virginia Lee Burton's classic picture book Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. It has enough nuance and detail (both visual and narrative) to capture a child's attention on every single reading and enough to reconcile some parents to the repetition.

And this book, this derivative work, has detail and nuance as well. My parents, like show more Robert's, were well off enough to have a car in 1959: just one, which meant that if Mother had the car, Father would have taken public transit to work. And even a family with two well-educated parents, one with a professional income, would prefer to let their child take out the same beloved book every single week, suffer the weekly arguments about why-not-take-out-another-book-PLEASE and the-other-children-want-a-turn-with-Mike, and endure the sulks and grief when Robert did not check out Mike Mulligan -- rather than actually buy Robert the book for his very own. My own mother, a collector of antiquarian books who had earned her master's degree in physics, did buy books for us, but only books that the library could not obtain! She subscribed to the Blackwell's catalogue and we got parcels shipped to California. It would be unusual for Robert not to own a copy of his favourite book today, but his mother probably never considered buying one in 1954.

Dropping Robert off on the curb close to the library is another choice a mother in my or my children's generation would probably not make, but mothers in my own parents' time were simply insouciant like that. So Mike's House is very much a piece of social history. I never saw Mike's House in the libraries of my childhood and finally encountered it as a library discard in the 1980s or 90s, but it's a treasure for its relatability (to me): I'm keeping it! show less