A familiar comment on the dust jackets of children’s books of my youth was “This belongs on the shelf with. … ” Such a placement can occur only in a private collection, as libraries and bookstores shelve alphabetically, and kids drop books anywhere. Still, I like the notion that books can have a family feeling, that they can resemble their illustrious forebears enough to cluster on the same shelf for a sense of community.
“Have you ever heard of Stuart Little? Or ‘Ratatouille’?” asks the mouse narrator of the droll and delightful “Always, Clementine,” by Carlie Sorosiak (“I, Cosmo”). “Mice have really bad luck in books,” admits her friend, a human boy. “There’s this book about witches. …” (Roald Dahl and Beatrix Potter — and Aesop before them — have a lot to answer for.)
So on whatever shelf you park “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” and “The Rescuers,” clear some space. Here are three treasures worthy of their illustrious cousins. Each novel, in its own arresting manner, works a change on classic tropes.
“Always, Clementine” is a tale of two mice who escape from a research lab, Clementine having been rendered scathingly brilliant in an almost “Flowers for Algernon” way, without the regression.
The book jump-starts itself with a lovely and nervy conceit: that we write in our heads. (I’ve written a lot of this review while walking to post letters.) “Dear Rosie, There once was a mouse. That’s me. Hello! … This is my first time writing a letter. And it’s not even writing! It’s more like thinking. I am thinking a letter.”
The story unfolds in thought-letters over the next week, as Clementine tells Rosie, a still incarcerated chimpanzee friend, about eluding her captors, about proving her mettle by playing and beating a chess master on television, and about coming to terms with a whole new view of the world. Rollicking? Yes, plus great fun, while the broadside against lab testing on animals won’t be lost on even the most naïve of readers. And a good thing too, squeak all my mouse friends.
“Violet & Jobie in the Wild,” by the irrepressible Lynne Rae Perkins (who won a Newbery Medal for her novel “Criss Cross”), takes on some of the same issues surrounding the novelty — and incidental cruelty — of the outside world, where in this case two house mice, cornered by humans, are unceremoniously dumped.
The brother and sister pair have grown up knowing only how to evade mousetraps and enjoy nature channels on television. Has this prepared them to be released into the wild? Would it prepare you?
Perkins (“Nuts to You”) illustrates her own book in smudgy gray tones. Her mice, though undressed, look a bit like William Steig’s Doctor De Soto or his Abel from “Abel’s Island.” And she writes with a keen immediacy; her tone is conversational, her chapters bounce.
What is true of Perkins’s other books is true here: She dares to skew the plot in ways older stories might not have done. (Then again, Stuart Little rode off into the sunset without having found his ladylove, Margalo.) The siblings begin to live separate lives as they meet other mice, which entails loss as well as gain.
Perkins never lets us down, though, even when the stakes are high. Terrified by her first up-close experience of a thunderstorm, Violet tries to block out the frightening sounds: “She hummed ‘Bringing In the Cheese,’ a happy song.”
“Odder,” by the Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate (“The One and Only Ivan”), is a subtle and ruminative story of a sea otter separated from her mother, tagged by a team of marine rescuers and released back into the wild for a few years.
Short chapters presented in free verse make this an easy book to read, though it’s the most sober of the three under review, thanks to the more realistic career of its protagonist.
“At first, she looked for her mother,/but no one seemed to know/what had happened to her./Mothers moved on./That was the way of things.”
The poetry is disarmingly sleek and swims through the pages with apparent effortlessness, pulling us along in helpless rapture.
Odder is attacked by a shark and returns to the marine center, where the care lavished on her by humans is sensitive and appropriate. It’s an antidote to the story of abuse that Clementine and her lab friends have survived.
But it’s still a life of hardship. We come to love Odder in Applegate’s terse and unvarnished presentation. The narrator speaks of all animals separated from their habitats and their species when she says, “there is never a perfect time/to let go of the ones we love.”
Applegate’s Odder will win your heart, even without a plush animal available for sale on the same shelf. Charles Santoso’s pencil drawings of her are sea-smooth and winning.
Subject to our whims, our ignorance and our apathy about their welfare, animals live next door to us. In this way they are emblems of how we humans treat one another.
Why is it children understand Aesop’s “The Lion and the Mouse” so readily? Children are mice (and otters). By virtue of their youth and innocence, they are primed to dive into a new sea, escape toward a new world. Books like these by Sorosiak, Perkins and Applegate don’t solve problems of animal husbandry and human menace, but they offer the consolation of metaphor when considering lab mice, trapped pests and tagged mammals released into the wild. They suggest that survival is possible.
A novice in the outdoors, Perkins’s Violet muses: “So many firsts. Everyone remembers that first time they ate a caterpillar, but the second or third time? Not so much. Things we do for the first time just become things we do all the time. The New Life just becomes: Life.”
This is what we hope for our children when we release them into the wild — that they will claim their New Life and charm it into: Life.
Gregory Maguire is the author of “Wicked” and “The Oracle of Maracoor,” as well as the middle grade novel “Cress Watercress,” about a family of rabbits.
ALWAYS, CLEMENTINE | By Carlie Sorosiak | 304 pp. | Walker Books US | $17.99 | Ages 8 to 12
VIOLET & JOBIE IN THE WILD | By Lynne Rae Perkins | 240 pp. | Greenwillow | $16.99 | Ages 8 to 12
ODDER | By Katherine Applegate | Illustrated by Charles Santoso | 288 pp. | Feiwel & Friends | $16.99 | Ages 8 to 12
