TIME TO GO HOUSE

You've just ""gone house"" with young Smalleata and her Grand Uncle Stilton and the other field mice and settled in for a long winter's stay--the humans are gone, the predators can't get in--when you get word of Mr. Gogie, apparently an elfin creature. Mentioned by Smalleata's protector Raffles the field mouse as viewer of the mid-winter State of the Human Union Message on TV, Mr. Gogie is an exotic in a closed, not implausible animal community. Awaited uneasily by the reader, he turns out to have little function. Also discordant is the spotty political satire, from the rats named Rockendollar to the ""Message"" delivered by President Abraham Lyndon with its alibis for the unnamed but unmistakable War in Vietnam. By itself the growing bond between Smalleata and Raffles--he indoctrinating her in the sport of the stair game, in the technique of springing traps--culminating in their mixed (field and house mouse) marriage, would have made a quietly satisfying, quite droll story.