By Dav Pilkey
A lonely little mouse and a giant flying robot become best friends and team up to stop the evil scientist who built the robot to wreck the city.
Ricky Ricotta is a small mouse who feels small: bigger children pick on him and he wishes he had someone on his side. Meanwhile, the wicked Dr. Stinky McNasty builds an enormous robot to help him take over the town, but the robot won't be bad, so Dr. Stinky tries to destroy it. Ricky saves the robot, the robot saves Ricky, and just like that a lonely mouse has the biggest, strongest, kindest best friend in the world. When Dr. Stinky comes after them, mouse and robot fight back together. It's the classic Dav Pilkey engine, an underdog, a huge silly threat, and a giant battle where the good guys win.
This is Dav Pilkey before Dog Man, and it does the same job: it makes a nervous reader feel like reading is easy. Every couple of pages there's a big cartoon picture to carry the story, the sentences are short and repetitive in the way beginning readers love, and there's even a Flip-o-rama flip-the-pages animation for the fight. Over the summer it's a low-effort win for a child who won't sit for dense text, and it's the first of a long, numbered series, so one yes turns into a whole shelf of easy successes.