EINSTEIN

To a mouse, even space and time must bend when there’s cheese involved.

Having long looked forward to visiting the world’s greatest cheese festival, a mouse is stunned to find only a hall full of packing crates. “That was yesterday, Einstein!” says a replete fellow rodent sarcastically. “You’re a day late!” Well, might it be possible to turn back time? What is time anyway? As in Armstrong (2016) and Edison (2018), Kuhlmann employs a mix of narrative and fantastically detailed mouse’s-eye-view pencil-and-watercolor scenes to portray a small, furry investigator intrepidly tackling scientific and technological challenges in a human-sized world—here involving old records in a certain Swiss patent office, clock gears and computer parts, trial and error, and equations on chalkboards. Not to mention the guts to climb inside a cobbled-together gizmo and the cleverness, when he accidentally ends up in pre-computer 1905, to entice a certain young patent clerk with a familiar brushy mustache to do the necessary calculations for a return trip—minus a day. This he does with a series of leading riddles about the relationship between space and time (what, you thought Einstein came up with relativity on his own?). The author closes with an overview of the great (human) scientist’s life and a set of reasonably clear thought experiments demonstrating some of his insights. Einstein, drawn with great fidelity, and other, less-distinct human figures are White.

Another milestone in human-mouse collaboration, virtuosic of visuals and tongue in cheek of tone.