El ratón y la montaña (The Rat and the Mountain)

This story is an adaptation of a tale that the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote to his two children in a letter from prison.

It follows the traditional cumulative fable structure where a character needs something and asks another character, who then asks for something else in order to give them what they first asked (like If you Give a Mouse a Cookie or the traditional Passover song, Chad Gadya). In this case, a boy has run out of milk to drink and so the rat asks the goat for milk. The goat asks for grass to eat, so the mouse asks the field for grass. But the field has dried up and asks for water. The mouse asks the builder to repair the irrigation system, and the builder asks for stones. The rat goes to ask the mountain for stones, and promises that when the boy grows up he will plant all kinds of trees to replace those removed by deforestation. The chain of requests succeeds and the boy grows up and plants all types of trees, fulfilling the promise.

It is at the end of the story that we learn through a brief summary of his life who Antonio Gramsci was, and that this story is one he made up for his children.

The take away from this story is that a community works together to help one another, and in turn, heal a town ravaged by war and unethical industrialization, which is to be read as Mussolini’s industrialist fascist war machine.

Laia Domènech’s illustrations, however, vivid and impressionistic, accomplish their task in guiding the text. In a well-executed, subtle transition, the images move from a before-time that exists behind grey-scale shadows into a colourful, more hopeful, landscape of greens and yellows. These are really stunning images that make you want to sit and look at each page for a moment.

From the reader´s report by Charles Lee