I will forever love books with mice as main characters, although I am terrified of mice in real life. Fredle, obvi, is the star of Cynthia Voight’s Young Fredle. Fredle has a nice comfortable life as a house mouse – feeding off kitchen food at night. One day though, he and his cousin get into some chocolate. It tastes amazing at first, but little do the two know that it makes mice SICK. So anyways, they get ill and the other mice push Fredle and his cousin out to ‘went’ which basically means to die. YEAH I KNOW. WHAT THE WHAT? How could you leave your own family to die.
Young Fredle
Clearly mice and people are not the same, y’all. Fredle totally doesn’t die and if you thought he did then you have no sense of prediction based on book titles, because as you can see from the back of the book or goodreads summary of Young Fredle, we get to witness all of Fredle’s adventures in the outside world. He gets to meet different types of mice — field mice and cellar mice. He also meets up with dogs (YAY I LOVE DOGS) and is almost eaten by a pack of raccoons. HOWEVER, Fredle just wants to get back to his family in the kitchen. Along the way he will have many trials and adventures. He learns that he doesn’t quite know everything — tough lesson, but I think everyone learns this eventually. ALSO YOU GUYS THE CAST OF CHARACTERS. I know that isn’t a complete sentence, but the friends Fredle makes are awesome, including my favorite — Sadie, the overenthusiastic dog.
Young Fredle by Cynthia Voight is a cute middle grade animal read, and if you didn’t get that from any of the above, I’m clearly not doing my hobby right. If you enjoy reading animal centered books (bro, I totes DO) you’d probably be down with Young Fredle. Also if you have a know it all child, give them this book so they know that indeed, they do NOT know it all. Morals, y’all. That’s all I’m going to say.
Now, I totally read Young Fredle as an audiobook, because it’s that time of year where I put like 1000 miles a month on my car for work, and also where I clean and work out like CRAZY. So, I took two days to audio Young Fredle, which was a GOOD LIFE DECISION. The narrator, Wendy Carter is perfect and brings a special touch to Voight’s novel. She does different voices for all of the characters. AND YOU GUYS, I loved Sadie’s voice. She does the perfect hyper, overeager dog. AND all the raccoons sound like they are from Brooklyn — I love that. When she’s doing the narrating parts, between dialogues, Carter’s voice is very melodic. I liked her reading and will look into other books that she’s narrated. I’d recommend the audiobook of Young Fredle by Cynthia Voight for younger readers and for kid lit fans who want to try audiobooks because it is fantastically produced by Listening Library and is only 6 hours and 19 minutes long.
Disclosure: I borrowed this from my local library.
This is a CYBILS nominee.
Other Reviews of Young Fredle by Cynthia Voight:
Eva’s Book Addiction
Geo Librarian
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I know what you mean…I loved the mouse in the Kate DeCammillo book…the little teeny tiny one who loved the princess…
I love Cynthia Voigt with my whole heart. Her books have been SUCH a huge part of my growing up reading. Most of the stuff by her has been Contemporary (although her Novels of a Kingdom set is phenomenal) but I will probably look into reading this just because CV is amazing.
So glad to hear that you loved it! 😀