By Beverly Cleary
A mouse named Ralph finds out he can ride a boy's toy motorcycle, so long as he makes the engine noise himself, and suddenly the whole hotel is his to explore.
Ralph is a mouse living in the walls of a shabby roadside hotel, bored stiff, until a boy named Keith checks in with a shiny toy motorcycle. Ralph climbs on, grips the handlebars, and finds out that if he makes a pb-pb-b-b-b sound with his mouth, the little bike actually goes. From there he and Keith strike up a friendship, and Ralph gets into one scrape after another buzzing around the place.
This is one of the great first 'real books.' The chapters are short, the mouse is exactly the size of a child's own daydream, and the whole thing runs on imagination and a made-up engine noise instead of any magic spell. Cleary keeps the funny right up front, so a reader who's just getting steady with chapters has something to laugh at every few pages. Mine kept sneaking off to read the next one alone, which is about the best sign there is at this age.