Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo 

Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.

Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.

No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.