The Wagon Race

Adele Ashby was the former editor of Canadian Materials for Schools and Libraries.

Johnny Mouser, Franz von Rooster, and Wiggle, a fat pig, are three friends who live on Mudpy Farm. In the first of these three tales, they decide to try to stay up until midnight. They borrow the farmer’s alarm clock and indulge in a number of antics including dressing up as ghosts. However, the alarm does not go off because Franz settles down for what is left of the night on its alarm but-ton. In The Visitor, Little Cloud, a lamb, comes to visit Wiggle, who introduces his friends. They all go off for a bike ride. In The Wagon Race, the three friends ride the bike to the garbage dump where they find a wagon. Johnny takes off in it, tumbles over a bluff, and is rescued by Franz and Wiggle.

These slight, episodic, inconsequential stories are translations from the German. They cannot have been very strong in the original, and here they are not helped by a translation that at times seems awkward. Moralizing interpolations occasionally break the tenuous story-line: “Real friends do apologize when they have made a mistake.” However, the watercolour illustrations are charming.