THE MAYOR OF CENTRAL PARK

Central Park’s furred and feathered residents face an incursion of gangster rats in this turn-of-the-20th-century tale of baseball, interspecies romance, and ingenuousness triumphant. The sudden appearance of Big Daddy Duds and his well-armed thugs compels Oscar Westerwit, a bon vivant squirrel who considers himself the park’s unofficial “Mayor,” to take action. His ragtag “army” is quickly dispersed, but unexpected allies have been at work behind the scenes, and persuade Oscar to play on Duds’s predilection for baseball by challenging him to a winner-take-all game. With Oscar’s new heartthrob Maud making a surprise appearance on the mound, the good guys come out on top, of course. Told in rollicking, streetwise language, the episode rolls fluidly along, and aside from one wounded rabbit the violence never escalates beyond threats—but there’s more baseball talk than baseball action. Avi can do better than this predictable plot, and despite his habit of calling park residents “voters,” and Floca’s natty Wind in the Willows–type animal figures, any satiric or metaphorical subtext is buried beyond recovery. (Fiction. 10-12)