Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series.
The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. As favors to series fans Avi slips in a few cameos (notably by vituperative porcupine Ereth and local contractors of the Derrida Deconstruction Company) and a musical arrangement for Ragweed’s theme song, “A Mouse Will A-Roving Go.” Floca supplies spot and full-page illustrations (not seen in finished form) featuring, mostly, mouse-level views of events.Ī characteristically droll lagniappe for a durable and popular series.
Party time! As night falls, the two main mice slip away to dance in the moonlight…setting up Ragweed’s first and last appearance in the rather naturalistic scene that opens Poppy (1995), the first-published book in the series. In a stretched-out sequence of entrances and exits, Poppy manages to free herself, but Ragweed is snared, ultimately leading to a climactic mad scramble involving a family of humans, an eager dog, two raccoons, and hundreds of Poppy’s sibs and relatives.
After squiring Lotar back to his mom, Ragweed finds himself on a second rescue mission after meeting Poppy, who has obliviously danced herself into a live-catch trap. Picking up where Ragweed (1999), chronologically the first book in the series, left off, the footloose golden mouse with the single earring again finds himself on a train-though not for long, as Lotar, a large but very young and “double-down dumb” raccoon, climbs into the boxcar and is separated from his mother when it begins moving. Avi returns to Dimwood Forest, filling a gap in the series with the story of how Poppy the deer mouse met her flamboyant friend.
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