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.