The Flight of the Fox

My 10 year old son has just finished this book and he loved it. I had to convince him to try it because he has a habit of judging a book by it's cover. Once he started to read it he really enjoyed it, so much so that he has just recommended it to his 5th grade class.

I had read this book as a boy, sometime around 1984, 12 years old at the time. A lover of animal tales (i read the entire "Mouse and the Motorcyle" series) and a small engine and R/C enthusiast (though i could never afford such luxuries), this book took me places and had me doing things i could only dream of.Time Passed, and the details blurred with the passing of the years. However, the story and it's characters held fast in a corner of my mind, though the title eluded me. Repeated searches through the fiction section of my library proved fruitless. i REALLY wanted to read this book again!With the inception of the internet in the early nineties, i turned to newsgroups and the limited search engines the infantile web offered at the time. NOTHING! So, then, from time to time, i searched for the only details i remembered: "Crispin, plane, Kangaroo Rat..."i FINALLY hit paydirt a week or so ago, and a page devoted to children's books listed the book and it's author. i immediately headed here and ordered it! When it arrived, i spent the night reading it. Now, my four kids can share in my delight with this book!Thanks, Mrs. Murphy, and though i learned that you are busy with a "cat detective" series, i PRAY that one day you will tell us where Rory and Crispin's adventures have taken them.

Ever since spending the winter in an airplane hangar, Rory the kangaroo rat has longed to fly. His seemed an impossible dream - until he finds the old model plane. But before he could hide it and then begin to work on it, Charlie Gribble came along - a boy as interested in the plane as Rory was. Together, Rory, Charlie, and Crispin the lemming made a good team. And the model plane soon became a real plane. But one problem remained - a huge flock of starlings. With all the starlings, the plane couldn't take off. But what could one lemming, one boy and one rat do about it? Although the characters are a bit shallow, the story was very well written, like all of Murphy's novels. If you love planes and human-animal communicaton furry tales, give this a try.