The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle is a story for 8 year olds about a mouse who hears a toy engine noise and knows at once that he has to ride.

A family checks into Room 215 of a shabby old hotel in the California foothills. Mum thinks the place is spooky and probably full of mice. Keith says he wouldn't mind a few mice.

He is being watched while he says it.

Ralph is a young mouse living behind a knothole in the wall, and he has been sizing Keith up from the moment he walked in. Small messy children are best, because they drop crumbs. A boy this size will at least leave a good sweet wrapper.

Then Keith tips his toy cars onto the bedspread and starts making the noises. Vroom for the sports car. Wh-e-e for the ambulance. And for the little red motorcycle, pb-pb-b-b-b.

That sound does something to Ralph. He forgets he is starving. He has waited his whole life to hear it without knowing.

The second the family goes down to dinner he is out of the hole and halfway up the telephone cord, with his mother shouting at him from the skirting board.

What makes it such good company is the scale of everything. A metal wastepaper bin is a place things are lost forever. A telephone cord is a rope ladder. A vacuum cleaner is a monster. Ralph's mother has a list of things to worry about and every single item on it is true.

Your reader will probably be a little bit Ralph about it. He is reckless. He stays out in the daytime. He wants to go exploring down the hall instead of travelling under the floorboards like a sensible mouse. And the moment the motorcycle is in his paws, he is not really thinking about the consequences.

One small thing to know. Ralph's father is dead before the book starts. He tried to carry an aspirin tablet in his cheek and was poisoned by it, and the family have avoided them ever since. It is a couple of sentences in passing, not a scene, but a child who has been upset by an animal story before might want you nearby. The hotel is American, so there is the odd bellboy and Fourth of July, and none of it gets in the way.

Ralph's own book comes next. Runaway Ralph has him fed up with being told what to do, riding out of the hotel to a summer camp, and discovering that cats and watchdogs are a good deal less friendly than Keith was.