Handsome Bill

Accurate and artful pencil drawings capture the desert creatures that Handsome Bill, the House Mouse encounters when he is invited to come visit his friend''s unusual home in the desert, high up in a saguaro cactus! In a cactus?

Rattlesnakes, flash floods, scorpions, a tortoise eating flowers are but a few of the eye opening scenarios that the two friends encounter. An educational adventure into the lives of the desert population, flora and fauna, weather and distance. He finds out about tarantulas and tarantula wasps (now there''s a scary story!) and about finding high ground when it rains way off in the mountains on the edge of the desert.

Normally he happily lives in a great big house with his own tiny mouse hole, daily little food gifts from the house kids, Ben and Sally, nice warm rags to curl up in ...

If you were to look out the back door of this nice house, the desert looks pretty. It''s calm, the colors are interesting and if you''ve lived in the same place for a while ... it is definitely an adventure worth considering ... especially if you are a mouse!

Little does Handsome Bill know what he is getting into. Friend Cactus Joe fails to mention that it''s full of quite different creatures than Ben and Sally.

Follow Handsome Bill as he meets up with all kinds of bugs and plants, coyotes and owls. The food is different and what''s this about eating a drink of water? The desert is rich in adventure for everyone ...including mice!

Author Edith Nettleton has for years been a storyteller for grade school children, was a docent for 10 years at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, California where she also exercised and fed the raptors. She just plain loves nature and wants to share that love.

Illustrator Carole Petersen Dwinell has been practicing to be an artist since she could hold a pencil. It''s starting to work!