MERLE THE FLYING SQUIRREL

Peet's latest yam concerns a timid city squirrel named Merle, lured by park bench tales about the beautiful big trees out West -- ""standin' there for thousands of years just storin' up quiet."" Merle decides to follow the telephone lines West, and just as he has concluded that he'll never get out of the city he is carried off on the tail of a kite he has tried to untangle from the wires, sailing and whirling through all kinds of landscape and weather until he lands at his initial destination, on top of a giant redwood. Peet's artless crayon pictures of Merle's sweeping flight to the clear Western forest through factory smoke and rainstorm and whirlwind will carry his substantial following through this mere wisp of a story.