Home for the holidays, I decided tonight was a night for logging. The problem was, I decided this at 2 in the morning. Fortunately, back here at home, I have a slight abundance of short children's books that can typically be banged out in a couple of hours. This one took less than one to finish. It was really nothing special. A talking cricket befriends a talking mouse and a talking cat in a subway station newsstand. They have a few adventures and before long the cricket gets homesick and tired of city life and so he leaves for rural Connecticut. The only thing of note was that a Chinese man in the book spoke with a severe printed accent; the author replaced most of his R's with L's, a move that couldn't possibly have flown today. (The book was written in 1960, back when it was still kosher to call black people "colored." Hell, this was when Eisenhower was still president - it was probably still kosher to call them "niggers." I mean, they still had their own bathrooms and drinking fountains. Yikes.) Anyway, I think you can see what I'm getting at: nothing at all. And that fittingly sums up my reaction to another Newbery-nominated book.
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