A mouse family is having everyone over. The kitchen is already going, an apple crisp and a pumpkin stew are being carried carefully across the room, cousins are chasing each other under the table, and somebody keeps stopping to say out loud what they are glad about. That is the whole book, and at sixteen pages it is exactly the right length for a toddler at the noisiest meal of the year.

Deb Adamson writes it in rhyme, which is doing real work here: the repeating beat is how a one year old hears language structure before they can produce it. Benedetta Capriotti paints in the deep reds, golds and greens of a late November afternoon, and the last spread turns into a scatter of photographs, so the book ends on the memories rather than on the food.

Sixteen thick board pages in a wide landscape format, seven and a half inches across. Printed in the United States, which the jacket carries a flag badge for, and published by Cottage Door Press in September 2022.