POPPY’S RETURN

Avi’s intrepid deer mouse sets out for a visit home in this fifth Dimwood Forest adventure, taking along her mutinously adolescent son Ragweed Junior in hopes of promoting some bonding.

The ominous news that a bulldozer (owned by the “Derrida Deconstruction Company”) has been parked next to Gray House, the ramshackle farmhouse where Poppy’s pompous father and his multitudinous descendants still live, prompts the trip. Thanks to her previous exploits, Poppy arrives to a hero’s welcome, but barely has time to do more than organize a frantic evacuation before, in a slapstick climax, Junior, his (literally) unsavory buddy Mephitis the skunk and trash-mouthed Ereth the porcupine manage to start up the ’dozer and convert the house into a pile of kindling—which is to say, a mouse condo. The plot, though, takes second fiddle to the author’s proposition that parents too can be “Sick,” (i.e., cool) and teens, despite unappealing personal habits, not quite as hopeless as they might seem.

Well, it’s a worthy thought, and, well supplied with Floca’s ground-level vignettes, agreeably presented.