Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

After spending years in remote locations with her scientist mother, ten-year-old Megan must now move in with her father and stepmother in Oregon while her mom goes off to Australia. Her inventor uncle gives her a gift—a computer so tiny they name it “the Thumbtop”—but it doesn’t help Megan make new friends or build a relationship with her stepmother. However, the world’s mice (who have learned to read, write, and use computers after the Silicon Valley boom) have their beady little eyes on the Thumbtop, which is just their size. The mice send an emissary, Trey, one of the few mice who have learned how to speak (most mice use MSL—Mouse Sign Language—to communicate with one another) to make contact with Megan. Megan quickly gets over her initial startlement and befriends Trey and his partner mice, and together they embark upon a plan that will enable the mice to manufacture the Thumbtop while also creating an alliance between the mouse and human worlds and improving the lives of Megan’s various (and mostly unwitting) family members. Although the characterizations (with the exception of Megan) are less well developed than the plot, Breitrose has created a fascinating and amusing parallel mouse world, in which mice thoughtfully put their poop in plastic zip-top bags when stowing away in human luggage and employ an elaborate multi-mouse system for using human-sized computers. The book’s almost 400-page length may seem intimidating, but the kids who love this kind of human-animal fantasy interaction will fly through the accessible, quick-paced text that is punctuated with Yue’s simple, attractively tidy black-and-white illustrations.