The Mouse and the Motorcycle

The Mouse and the Motorcycle is a children's novel written by Beverly Cleary, illustrated by Louis Darling and published in 1965. It is the first of a trilogy featuring Ralph S. Mouse, a house mouse who can speak to humans, usually children, rides a miniature motorcycle and wants a life less ordinary than the one his family has in a run-down hotel.

The material came from two everyday places. Cleary's son played with miniature cars and motorcycles while recovering from a fever, and a neighbour once showed her a small mouse that had been trapped in a bucket. The book was a selection of the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club in its intermediate division, and it won the William Allen White Children's Book Award in 1968.

Cleary wrote two further books about Ralph in the decades that followed, and a film adaptation was produced in 1986. Its appeal is the mismatch between the scale of the hotel and the scale of the mouse who wants to leave it. Its chapters turn on the risk of being seen, which is the danger every mouse in a hotel full of guests has to weigh against the wish to be something more than one of the family.