Mouse stars in Rosalia author’s first children’s book

Rosie the mouse scampers past the historic clock tower on Whitman Street on a crisp fall day. She pops on over to the Texaco station to meet a new friend before scurrying past a giant mail box back home beneath the town’s post office.

Rosie’s adventures through Rosalia, her namesake, are chronicled in the debut children’s book of author Marcy Campbell, Rosie’s Scary Tale.

Campbell said Rosie was born out of her effort to relate the story of Rosalia’s Battle Days in a form more palatable to children.

“I figured it was a good way to teach them about Battle Days without it being a boring history lesson,” said Campbell.

Since that first tale, Campbell has come up with three more adventures for Rosie, Rosie’s Scary Tale, a city mouse/country mouse tale and a Christmas story.

Campbell has been telling these stories at town happenings like Battle Days, the Fall Festival and the town’s winter festival.

Rosie’s Scary Tale is the first one of those tales to be published.

In it, Rosie, alone in the fall after children returned to school, meets a fast-talking mouse from Spokane at the Texaco station. The city mouse tells Rosie a tale about a ghost cat that leads the imagination of the little mouse on a wild tale of paranoia in which all of the Rosalia landmarks that have been so familiar to Rosie become objects of abject terror. Eventually Rosie is soothed by her mother in the family’s home beneath the Rosalia Post Office.

The story was brought to life by Isabel Cloutier, the pen name of Campbell’s anonymous illustrator.

Campbell, who substitutes at the Rosalia school, got some important market research from her students. Two years ago she read Rosie’s Scary Tale to children who were in kindergarten.

“It’s really fun to see how they react to what Rosie goes through,” said Campbell.

This year, she brought the story and the new illustrations into the second grade class to read to those same children.

“They loved it,” she said. “I think they really loved seeing the pictures too. A lot of them said Rosie matched what they had pictured in their heads.”

Rosie got mixed reviews from the farm families of some of those students. Showing a sympathetic mouse who gathers kernels of wheat for her family’s winter stock makes it a lot tougher to set a mouse trap in the shop.

“I did get a lot of that from farmers. Asking me, why did you pick a mouse?” she laughed.

Campbell set up her own publishing company to release this boo, and had it printed by Market Books in Spokane. She is planning to release the city mouse/country mouse tale next spring, with Rosie’s Christmas story coming out next winter.

“I think there’ll be lots of Rosie stories,” she said.