Crackers

In this mild-mannered caper, a French feline named Crackers takes to mice and cheese. The cat finds, then loses, a succession of menial jobs; his sin is being nice to mice, whom his employers scorn. (""You're supposed to chase mice in this warehouse, not make friends with them!"" says his first boss, a bulldog.) Crackers decides he would be happiest working in a mouse-owned cheese shop. The bespectacled owner is understandably suspicious of the fellow's intentions, but the cat rounds up the mice he has befriended as references and lands the post. With a light touch, Biet's ink-and-wash drawings convey Crackers's disillusionment on his way to the right job and incorporate images of French leisure bubbles coming off champagne flutes in a restaurant, pleasure boats on the river, picnics with cheese and baguettes. This newest book by the team behind Wolf! delivers its message about being kind to the weak rather than kowtowing to the powerful as smoothly and as easily digestible as Camembert on croissant. Though Crackers's fecklessness dilutes his heroism somewhat (he spends as much time agonizing about what to wear to interviews as he does defending mice), he is a hero of achievable status. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)