HERCULES AMSTERDAM

Haber turns Stuart Little inside out for an inventive, tongue-in-cheek children’s debut. Ten years old and three inches high, Hercules escapes cats and other dangers, real or imagined, by going through a mouse hole, and discovers beneath his apartment floor an entire tiny town, lit by magically glowing cheese and populated by peaceful, generous, live-for-the-moment mice. Ever studious (“ . . . he wanted to be safe at home, curled up on the pages of a good book”), Hercules soon learns from the town chronicles that the mice are massacred at regular intervals by savage rats; searching for a way to break this ugly cycle without causing more killing takes him from the dusty ruins of former mouse towns to the hidden realm of small but powerful sorceresses. With help from mouse and human allies, he holds off the unspeakably brutal rats long enough for the mice to escape, then returns, now magically full-sized, to his own world. A quirky but engaging disquisition on number systems (most mice can’t count past three) closes this witty, well-told beneath-the-floorboards adventure. (Fiction. 10-12)