Little Alice Mongoose has a loving home and doting parents in India, but she is eager to have a grown-up job and make her mark on the world. She travels to the Big Island of Hawaii, where mongoose are very much in demand. On the voyage over, as she is nibbling on one of the hard-boiled eggs her father packed for her, an unpleasant man with big boots comes over and tells her what her job in Hawaii will be: to kill rats in the cane fields.
Poor Alice is shocked. She has never met a rat, she is not a killer, and she does not like this man. When the ship reaches land, Alice collects all of her little hatboxes and steamer trunks and strikes out on her own.
When she meets the gentle and dapper Alistair Rat, she knows that she has found a friend in her new Hawaiian home.