ORRIS AND TIMBLE

Unlikely friends Timble the owl and Orris the rat suffer a sudden separation in this second episode of a planned trilogy.

Having filled his feathered friend’s head with stories of quests, the bookish Orris should be unsurprised when Timble, who’s growing into a mature owl and yearns to visit the stars and moon, fails to appear one night…and then the next. Still, his friend’s disappearance is enough to make a rat feel fretful, as well as a little abandoned. But worry turns to resentment when Timble does at last come back. It takes a little time and an emotional exchange (“I waited and waited for you.” “I was lost”) to mend fences. Orris also heeds the slogan on a salvaged sardine tin (“Make the good and noble choice”), which the rat sometimes talks to when he’s alone. Laying out her themes early on and then quietly working them into the narrative, DiCamillo packs intense feelings into and between the lines of her simply phrased tale, set off perfectly by Mok’s spare, neatly drawn barnyard settings. As it turns out, Timble has returned with a story of his own, about an owl who flew too high and got lost, and the dramatic telling leaves the two friends perched side by side on the barn roof, as close as ever. “The owl listens to the rat, and the rat listens to the owl, by the light of the stars, by the light of the moon.”

Sensitive and quietly enthralling.