Millhouse

Gr 3–6—As the former pet of the actor, Sir Roderick Lord Kingswagger, Millhouse, a hairless guinea pig, revels in the theater. When Sir Roderick dies, Milly finds himself for sale in a pet store. The other animals despise Milly just for being hairless, but Pepper Brown, the ferret, loathes the guinea pig with a single-minded passion and is determined to make dinner out of him one day. In spite of the danger, Milly sneaks out of his cage at night and practices his Shakespeare, transforming the smallest bits of debris into theater props. The wild mice babies, who live in the walls of the shop, gradually become a voracious audience, and Eliot, the asthmatic rat and a fellow pet shop inmate, becomes a true friend. Predictably, there are a few skirmishes with the dastardly Pepper Brown, but Milly's foray into an actual theater to see a live performance with Peter Ustinov, escorted by the adult wild mice, is a fun surprise with a lively outcome. Many of the scenes in the story are exciting and entertaining, but the lulls among the action-packed events are anticlimactic and slow down the tale's momentum. The main problem with the story may be Milly himself. Although his unkind fellow inmates are criticized as being snobs, the protagonist can also come across as a prima donna. This makes him a less than endearing protagonist, although admittedly this is befitting his upbringing by Sir Roderick Lord Kingswagger.—Kathy Cherniavsky, Ridgefield Library, CT