Runaway Ralph Book

Young Keith Gridley has moved on from the Mountain View Inn, but not before giving Ralph S. Mouse his cherished toy motorcycle, which sets him apart from every other mouse in the world. Zooming up and down the hotel hallways at night, Ralph is the envy of his cousins, though his mother and Uncle Lester worry. He has a crash helmet Keith made for him out of a halved pingpong ball, but the speeds Ralph attains on his motorcycle have his mother convinced he's doomed to suffer an accident. Still a young mouse, Ralph is accountable to his family, and he longs to speed away from the Mountain View Inn and explore the world. Could a mouse and his motorcycle hit the road all alone and find fulfillment past the horizon? Ralph sets out into the night on his shiny chrome ride, committed to answering that question. But is he ready for the real world?

Danger is everywhere for a creature Ralph's size. Wild animals hunt at night, big trucks barrel along the roads, and dogs don't want stray mice entering their homes. In his final days at the Mountain View Inn Ralph observed a family with a boy Keith's age named Garf. He wore a Happy Acres Camp T-shirt, and now Ralph finds himself puttering up to that same camp, where a watchdog named Sam firmly insists he leave the premises. Sam is a decent gatekeeper, but giving him the slip isn't hard for Ralph on his bike. Safely within Happy Acres Camp, Ralph figures the time has come to stash his ride and settle in, but living on his own isn't going to be as easy as that.

Cats prowl Happy Acres Camp, the worst being Catso, who knows every trick in the feline playbook. Ralph is no match for him physically, but a human intervenes before Catso can bring Ralph's adventuring days to a dark end. Garf, the boy from the hotel, nabs Ralph in a butterfly net and transfers him to a cage, where he keeps him as a pet in the craft shop. Garf has disliked the camp experience thus far, so "Aunt Jill", one of the leaders, allows him to keep the mouse. Ralph might have believed Garf to be a kind boy like Keith if he hadn't heard the camp songs Garf belts out with his peers. Surely Keith wouldn't sing such appalling lyrics. But perhaps Garf needs Ralph more than either of them sees. He doesn't fit in with his fellow campers, and the rift widens when a girl named Karen loses her watch. No one directly accuses Garf of stealing it, but he spends a lot of time at the craft shop taking care of Ralph, and that's where Karen remembers leaving her watch. Garf has no way of knowing that Ralph saw exactly what happened to the watch. He's tired of living in a cage, and wouldn't mind returning to the Mountain View Inn even if it means submitting to his mother's rules. Can Ralph work with Garf to restore the sullen boy's reputation and get Ralph back home, or has too much changed for Ralph to ever go home again?

Most boys, like Ralph, reach the stage where living with their parents feels like more of a hassle than it's worth. They want freedom, a feeling Keith understood well in The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Runaway Ralph shows the natural result of leaving home to live by your own rules: getting locked in a different sort of cage, running around and around on a wheel that never seems to take you anywhere. Is it an improvement on what you had, or a step back? Ralph doesn't think hard about this until meeting Chum, a "philosopher" hamster from a neighboring cage in the craft shop. Their brief time together is marked by surprising depth of thought, probably the highlight of this book. Runaway Ralph is more philosophical though less poignant than The Mouse and the Motorcycle, but the two novels are roughly equal, and I rate them both two and a half stars. I enjoy the smooth, sweet readability of Beverly Cleary's books, and will always come back to read about Ralph S. Mouse again. I look forward to it.