A Mouse Called Wolf

A Mouse Called Wolf is about a mouse with two enormous names and a very small body.

What happens

He is the thirteenth of Mary Mouse's litter and half the size of the rest of them. His mother decides that a runt needs an important name to make up for it, and then finds one lying about. She has built the nest out of a shredded sheet of piano music, and one scrap that escaped her teeth reads WOLFGANG AMADEUS MO.

Perfect, she says.

His brothers and sisters think it is hilarious. They race each other along the piano keys, he comes last every single time, and they make up a rhyme to squeak at him whenever he falls off. In the end they shorten his name to Wolf purely to be unkind. He is secretly delighted.

This is Dick King-Smith doing the thing he does better than almost anyone. The entire story lives under the left front leg of a grand piano, and it never once feels small.

The turn comes when Wolf, alone one afternoon, sits down on middle C and tries to squeak a tune he has heard played above his head every evening. Out comes a clear little voice singing every note of it.

Then the cat arrives, and the next few pages are genuinely tense. Wolf and his mother scramble up into the body of the piano. The cat leaps after them, knocks the prop stick out, and the heavy lid comes down on the tip of its tail.

King-Smith handles this beautifully. The cat is not badly hurt, it heals, and it spends the rest of its life convinced that the mice set that trap on purpose. Your reader gets the fright and the joke in the same breath.

What is lovely underneath it all is the mothering. Mary is anxious and proud and snappish when she is tired. When she tells Wolf that mice cannot sing and to stop being a stupid child, it is because she has had a bad night foraging, not because she means it.

The chapters are short and each has a one-word title. A Name. A Joke. A Song. A Trap. It reads aloud very well, which matters rather a lot here, because half the pleasure is in the singing.

One note for British readers. This is the American text, so Wolf calls her Mommy and the mousehole is in the molding.

What to read next

A small animal with an unlikely talent, then. The Sheep-Pig is in the library too, and it is the same idea turned inside out. Babe is a piglet won at a village fair who announces that he would like to learn to herd sheep, and the farm collie raising him cannot think of a good reason to say no.