Mimi and Jean-Paul's Cajun Mardi Gras

Alice Wilbert Couvillon. Pelican Publishing Company, $15.95 (32pp) ISBN 978-1-56554-069-9

Just about everyone knows about New Orleans--style Mardi Gras, but traditional Cajun festivities have an even longer history. In Mimi and Jean-Paul's Cajun Mardi Gras by Alice Couvillon and Elizabeth Moore, illus. by Marilyn Carter Rougelot, the heroine of Mimi's First Mardi Gras joins her country cousins in admiring screen masks and ""chank-a-chank music,"" then marvels at the Courir du Mardi Gras, a procession of masked men on horseback who go from house to house to collect ingredients for the town's big gumbo feast. (Pelican, $14.95, 32p, ages 4-8 ISBN 1-56554-069-7, Jan.)

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