November 27, 2010

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH


It seems like my Newbery book posts have grown progressively shorter and more sarcastic. So I'll do my best to make this one as lengthy and meaningful as I possibly can. Umm, Mrs. Frisby is a field mouse and her youngest son is sick and bed-ridden but there is an imminent need for her family to relocate so she seeks advice from the rats of NIMH. NIMH stands for National Institute of Mental Health and the rats are actually lab rats who have escaped, but now they have humanlike intelligence thanks to some experiments, but they still don't know if they should help Mrs. Frisby or not until Mrs. Frisby overhears a bunch of people talking about exterminating a colony of rats and it turns out they are the rats of NIMH and Mrs. Frisby informs the rats thusly and, ever grateful, the rats of NIMH help her out. Man. Where do I even begin? It's too easy to start poking plot holes into a children's book with talking animals. It's too obvious to point out all of the flaws in the story and the concept. It'd be too harsh to rip into the author for boring characters and a lack of originality. So I won't do any of those things. Instead I'll just politely point out that with this book's completion I now have just 30 books left in my backlog. The Christmas season will surely knock that back up above thirty, even if I can get it below 30 before then, but for now, yeah, it's nice to have just 30 books left. And for that reason alone, I'm happy to have read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

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