Young Fredle

Cynthia Voigt's Young Fredle is an adventure for 8 year olds about a house mouse who asks far too many questions.

What happens

Fredle lives behind the second shelf of the kitchen pantry, in a nest made of old T-shirts and strips of a silk blouse, with fifteen of his relatives. At night they go out into the kitchen to forage. Crumbs, a pea, a smear of honey on a jar, cornflakes if you can chew through the box.

There are two rules that matter. Swallow the wrapping so the humans don't work out you're there. And keep safe.

The cat is the reason for the second one. It makes no sound at all.

Then there are the traps. Fredle's cousin Axle isn't scared of anything, which is why Fredle admires her, and one night a trap takes half her right ear. She crawls back bleeding and begs him not to let the others see.

That's when you find out what the mice mean by went.

Any mouse who is wounded or sick or too old to forage gets pushed out onto the pantry floor during the day and is never seen again. Nobody knows who does it, the humans or the cat or something worse. Everybody agrees it is how mice stay safe. Fredle's grandmother went that way and his grandfather still explains, patiently, why they had to.

Fredle wants to know why. He wants to know what went actually is, and whether outside is a real place or just a story, and whether a story being untrue matters. Everybody tells him to stop.

Then he and Axle find something on a high shelf that smells better than anything either of them has ever smelled, and start chewing through the wrapper.

The pleasure of it is being properly inside a mouse. They are colourblind to red, so the cheerful cranberry silk in the nest is just dark grey to them. The dogs hold whole conversations that the mice overhear. Axle lists all the words she has heard humans say but never tasted, such as custard and whoopie pie and kibbles.

If you've got a reader who likes an animal story with some grit in it, this is a good one. Worth knowing first that the pushing out of the weak is stated plainly and more than once, including about a grandmother, and a softhearted eight year old may need to talk about that.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Beverly Cleary's Mouse and the Motorcycle is in the library too. Ralph lives in a knothole in a hotel bedroom, watching the guests arrive, and he wants something from the human world so badly that he takes a very silly risk to get it.