Runaway Ralph

Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary is an animal story for 8 year olds about a mouse with a motorcycle and a very low opinion of his relatives.

What happens

Ralph lives under the grandfather clock at the Mountain View Inn, a run down old hotel in the California foothills. At nine o'clock, once the night clerk has fallen asleep over his book, Ralph fetches his mouse sized red motorcycle out from under the television and rides up and down the hall.

To make it go he has to breathe out and make a pb-pb-b-b-b noise. Nothing else works.

His family think he is selfish. Uncle Lester says he should move back upstairs and help lay in supplies for the lean months. His mother, who is frightened of people, vacuum cleaners, owls, cats, traps and poisoned grain, is sure he will break his neck. The little cousins want turns, and not fast ones either. Pushed.

Ralph would rather die.

So when he hears a bugle playing taps from a summer camp up the hill, night after night, he decides that is where he is going.

Cleary is very funny about the size of Ralph's feelings. He polishes his chrome by licking his paws and rubbing the dull spots. He calls it a bike and gets mocked by a cousin for showing off. Being asked to push a little mouse up and down the corridor strikes him as shocking, because a motorcycle is not a kiddy car.

Your reader is meant to see straight through him and like him anyway. It is a book about a small creature who thinks he is a daredevil, and the joke is warm rather than sharp.

What he finds at the camp is a good deal less glamorous than the open road. There is a cat. There are watchdogs. There is a boy called Garf who is there on his own and not enjoying it much either, and the two of them end up needing each other.

The chapters are a decent length and the vocabulary is richer than the cover suggests, so it works best for a confident 8 year old reading alone, or as a read aloud with a younger one.

One thing to expect. Ralph runs away because he is fed up with his mum and his uncle telling him what to do, and the book lets him be genuinely ungrateful about it for quite a while before anything softens.

What to read next

Ralph got that motorcycle from somebody, of course. Mouse and the Motorcycle goes back to Room 215 of the same hotel, and the boy who checked in with it.