Millhouse

April 15, 2014
A hairless guinea pig with self-esteem issues sheds them after several adventures. By day Millhouse--"Milly" as he calls himself--crouches in misery in his pet-store cage as the other animals in the unwieldy cast jeer at him and customers pass him by with barely a glance. At night, though, he escapes to ramble about the shop and (having previously belonged to a stage actor) declaim Shakespeare. With help from an asthmatic old rat and a squad of military mice, Milly not only keeps up with theatrical doings outside the pet shop, but at last finds a way to attend a performance of King Lear starring Peter Ustinov. Along with miraculously escaping repeated attacks by a vicious ferret who turns out to be a frustrated thespian himself, Milly later saves the shop from a fire and so becomes a hero whose reward ultimately comes in the person of a young girl who is also in love with theater and sweeps him away to a happy future on, as the last of the occasional delicately inked drawings reveals, a homemade stage. These events all feel thrown together haphazardly rather than strung together in a logical fashion. Moreover, unlike Stuart Little, Despereaux and the many other small creatures who have set out to find themselves, Milly's yearning to be sold to a new owner comes off as, at best, unambitious. A patchwork effort that makes neither hay of its protagonist's unusual talents nor much sense. (cast list) (Animal fantasy. 8-11)

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June 1, 2014

Gr 3-6-As the former pet of the actor, Sir Roderick Lord Kingswagger, Millhouse, a hairless guinea pig, revels in the theater. When Sir Roderick dies, Milly finds himself for sale in a pet store. The other animals despise Milly just for being hairless, but Pepper Brown, the ferret, loathes the guinea pig with a single-minded passion and is determined to make dinner out of him one day. In spite of the danger, Milly sneaks out of his cage at night and practices his Shakespeare, transforming the smallest bits of debris into theater props. The wild mice babies, who live in the walls of the shop, gradually become a voracious audience, and Eliot, the asthmatic rat and a fellow pet shop inmate, becomes a true friend. Predictably, there are a few skirmishes with the dastardly Pepper Brown, but Milly's foray into an actual theater to see a live performance with Peter Ustinov, escorted by the adult wild mice, is a fun surprise with a lively outcome. Many of the scenes in the story are exciting and entertaining, but the lulls among the action-packed events are anticlimactic and slow down the tale's momentum. The main problem with the story may be Milly himself. Although his unkind fellow inmates are criticized as being snobs, the protagonist can also come across as a prima donna. This makes him a less than endearing protagonist, although admittedly this is befitting his upbringing by Sir Roderick Lord Kingswagger.-Kathy Cherniavsky, Ridgefield Library, CT

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