THE TALE OF THE SWAMP RAT

"Takes a lot of little pieces to make up this big world," says the wise alligator Uncle Will (purportedly "twenty-five feet long, nose to tail" and 600 years old) to young rat Ossie in this debut novel, populated with a cast of charming creatures. The stage may be relatively small—the Great Swamp in an unnamed location in America—but Crocker paints it with deeply developed mythologies and folklore. Episodic in nature, the novel unspools as leisurely as a Southern drawl, through brief vignettes that introduce the swamp's various aspects and denizens. Readers will be swept up in the adventures of Prophet Bubba, a half-cracked bird who is revered as an oracle; Preacher, the grizzled old heron whose lines are laugh-out-loud funny in many places; and Uncle Will, the noble gator who adopts the recently orphaned Ossie. Curiously, the narrator, Little Mole, is the least developed character. Ossie himself emerges as a sympathetic and quietly heroic figure (and remarkably lifelike, given the fact that he doesn't speak for the first 100 pages). The larger story concerns the cycle of the swamp, and the way adversity causes the swampdwellers to turn against Ossie before finally seeing the light. At times the structure grows unwieldy, but the real joy here is simply spending time with these memorable characters. Ages 9-14. (Sept.)