![]() ![]() ![]() The Mouse and His Child was his first book and is now half a century old. Hoban was born in 1925, quietly redefining the novel with genre-bending, speculative fiction over a career that spanned sixty years until his death in 2011. “He had no idea what a mother might be,” Hoban writes, “but he knew that he needed one, badly.” “Are you my mama?” the child says to the clockwork elephant standing next to him. As we move inside the shop the toys begin to speak to each other. The father dances around in a circle, swinging his son up and down. ![]() He watches as toys are taken out of a doll’s house for display – an elephant, a seal and then two clockwork mice, a father and son. The Mouse and His Child begins with a tramp (the book’s only human character) looking through the window of a toyshop on Christmas Eve. As I sat on it and read Russell Hoban’s book, I thought about my family. It reminded me of living with my sisters, of the posters on the wall and the dusty globe on the shelf. It was uncomfortable and covered in stains, but it was a fixture in family pictures of the house I grew up in – a grainy bit of furniture in the background, sat next to a bookshelf and a little wooden seesaw. I spent my evenings reading on an old, yellow sofa my mother gave me when I left home. ![]() I was a 26-year-old living by myself when I first read The Mouse and His Child. ![]()
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