Magnus Powermouse

Dick King-Smith's Magnus Powermouse is a very funny farmyard tale for 7 year olds about a baby mouse who just keeps on growing.

What happens

Madeleine the mouse has six babies. Five are pink, normal and about the size of a fingernail. The sixth is already as big as a baby rat, and he's steamrollering over the others to get to the milk.

What's gone wrong? Her husband Marcus Aurelius finds the answer down in the pigsty. It's a packet of Pennyfeather's Patent Porker Pills, meant for fattening pigs, with a nibbled hole in one corner. Madeleine ate one every day while she was expecting. (She can't read, so the warning in red capitals was never going to help.)

The baby is named Magnus, which is Latin for great. He has four words to begin with. More, Nasty, Nice and Bite you. And he uses all of them a LOT.

Most of the fun is in his parents. Madeleine talks in broad country dialect and loves her enormous son to bits. Marcus Aurelius arrived from an Oxford college in a trunk of clothes, reads scraps of newspaper and never says anything short. He repeats himself too. Very great. Very great indeed. Read a few pages aloud and you'll be doing his voice by teatime!

Then there's the cat. Magnus isn't frightened of anything, which lands him in all sorts of trouble. A kind rabbit called Roland becomes Uncle Roland, and he's the one who accidentally gives Magnus his famous nickname.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a proper farmyard story and King-Smith doesn't soften it. The five other babies don't last the night, because Magnus has drunk all the milk. It's over in a line or two, right at the very start, but it's there. Later Magnus takes on the cat and bites the end off its tail, and there's blood on the sprouts.

For a child who's happy with animals being animals, it's a riot. For a very tender reader, you might want to share that first chapter together.

What to read next

If they fall for a mouse with a big name, A Mouse Called Wolf is the same idea the other way round. Wolfgang Amadeus Mouse is the smallest of thirteen, so his mum gives him the grandest name she can find to make up for it.