59. Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary

We got these Cleary books before our daughter was born and she never showed any interest in them.  She resisted having non-picture books read to her until she was 9 but I finally got us into a pattern of reading text-only books.  Since the last father daugher read, The Call of the Wild, was quite brutal (and also had a lot of difficult sentence structure and obscure vocabulary), we wanted something a little happier and lighter.  So she accepted going through her bookshelf and we ended up compromising on this one, that had been sitting there since she was born.  The lesson for us parents is patience.  

I think this may be the second Ralph book.  Here, Ralph is a young man mouse who yearns to ride his motorcycle freely but instead is forced to entertain his younger siblings.  When he gets a chance to run away, he takes it and ends up at a kids' summer camp and gets captured by one of the campers.  We follow two storylines, Ralph's attempts to escape and avoid the camp cat and indirectly the shy and estranged boy's integration into the camp.  It's tight and fun, though lacks some of the personality of the Ramona books.  We'll keep an eye out for the first book and I hope we can read it before my daughter ages out of interest in books about intelligent animals.