It starts with a lunch box. Hand it over and the mouse wants a sandwich to go in it, then a notebook, then pencils, then a corner of your backpack, and by the time he has built a mouse house out of blocks and run a science experiment you are sprinting for the bus. Laura Numeroff has been springing this trap on children since the first cookie, and it still works.

The circular joke is the reason it reads well aloud, but the quiet reason it sells every August is different. A child who is nervous about a first day gets to watch a whole school day happen at a safe distance, with the math and the spelling and the bus and the bell all going by while somebody smaller and sillier than them makes the mess.

Felicia Bond draws the mouse in overalls with a pencil half his size, and hides enough in each spread that the fifth reading is not the same as the first. Hardcover, thirty two pages, part of the If You Give series that most classrooms already own a shelf of.