Another book I think several students will enjoy but was just ho-hum for me.

It was a good book. Like most Dick King-Smith books a little graphic if you are unready for it.

littleguy

Flora is a mouse who lives in a school. She decides to teach herself how to read.

Spoiler

When the exterminator calls, Flora is able to read the POISON package and thus saves her life and some of her family members- but she doesn't get the warning out in time so all the other schoolmice die. Flora's mother takes her little siblings away from the schoolhouse, but the fields turn out to be even more dangerous, and she loses all but one of her little children, so back to the schoolhouse they go. Flora then teaches everyone to read (with varying degrees of success). Cute story with plucky characters, but sad that so many mice perished.

Хорошая книжка для ребенка 5-6 лет

Dick King-Smith will probably always be best known for his story of Babe the pig. Around our house, his most beloved story is "Fat Lawrence," the tale of a cat who games the neighborhood food system and then learns that who he really is and who his lady love wants him to be are the same thing. It's a great story.

Anyway, I didn't know what to read to the kids at bedtime, so I grabbed this one off the shelf. My youngest son had read it a couple of times, but I wasn't familiar with it. Like all of King-Smith's stories, it has good verbal wit and clever use of animal characters. Unlike the other stories of his that I've read, it also includes an amazing amount of death. Almost no characters in this book survive to the end!

While the story is okay, it's not especially gripping. I did like the part where the mice figure out how to dispose of their droppings so that the humans don't know there are mice in the schoolhouse. But other elements of the book--the weakness of male mice, the way in which mice are basically like humans except that they don't get married (I guess?)--are not impressive. It's a quick read, but not one of my favorites.

A beautifully told story about a little mouse and her family. This is an easy read for adults and children from one of the best story tellers. Unlike a lot of things written in a time of convulsed prose and fluffy stories of unnecessary words, this is a breathe of fresh air. The illustrations in this are also very charming.

This is a really great kids book, because it is adorable, but the actual events are quite serious. The main character, Flora; SPOILER ALERT
Gets rejected by her family
Witnesses a mass mice massacre (try saying that 5 times fast)
Loses all her siblings
Has a father with a missing tail and an injured ear, acquired through fights with other mice and an encounter with an owl
And her second set of siblings (tongue twister 2) gets devoured by a ferret.

But seriously, it is a cute little book despite these events.