Together Is Better: The Tall Man and the Small Mouse by Mara Bergman

On a tall hill in a tall house
lived a tall man and a small mouse.

All day the tall man did tall man things--plucking apples, removing cats and kites stuck in tall trees....

All night the mouse had small things to do, finding dropped pens and long-lost rings and pennies....

Since they worked different shifts, the tall man and the small mouse knew nothing of each other... until the day the tall man could not complete a tall task.

The tall man went to fix,
the town's great clock.
It had no tick;
it had no tock.

The tall man tried and tried and tried. The hands were stuck.
And he was too big to get inside. Bad luck!

The tall man goes home to study his clock book and slips off his tall boots to take a nap. And when he wakes, he discovers someone very small inside one boot--the mouse!

"Mouse," he said, "you're small and clearly clever.
I wonder whether
I may borrow you.
I've a most important thing to do.

The mouse complies, and when she tries, she finds inside a tiny piece to fix....

The town clock is good as new, and the two make their way home, new partners, as the tall man puts it:

We may be of a different kind,
But both of us can fix and find.

Two can be better than one when there are things to be done, in Mara Bergman's The Tall Man and the Small Mouse (Candlewick Press, 2018), a sprightly rhyming fable of combining traits and talents to get the job done. Berman's rhymes in free rhythm add to the fun of reading this one, and artist Birgitta Sif provides the long and the short of it in her long-stemmed spring flowers and elongated figures, finishing up with the Tall Man making an airplane for Mouse to pilot. In their starred review, Booklist says, "a rhythmic, rhyming text that reads aloud beautifully [and]... Capturing the sense, the polish, and the wit of the verse, Sif’s digitally colored pencil drawings bring their own elegance and charm to the narrative while adding amusing details for curious viewers to discover."