The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
(A Discworld novel)
Terry Pratchett
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Fantasy
****+
DESCRIPTION: Everyone's heard the story of the rat piper. A small helpless town, plagued by rats, is saved by the arrival of a stranger whose music lures the
vermin away; once the fee is paid by grateful residents, neither rodent nor man is seen again. If one were to look more closely at the tale, one might wonder just how
many rats it takes to constitute a plague, and how convenient it is that a piper arrives so quickly. Look even more closely, and one just might find a clever cat at the
heels of the piper... and, peering closer still, one might even see rats, cat, and piper meet outside of town to divide the money.
Maurice was once an ordinary alley cat, living in the rubbish heap outside a wizarding school, until he suddenly found himself empowered with speech and self-awareness.
Like any self-respecting cat, Maurice set about using his newly-enhanced brain to fleece dimwitted humans and better his own life. The local rats, too, began developing
unusual intelligence thanks to the magically toxic waste. Together with a stupid-faced young boy with a gift for music, they travel from town to town, making a killing
with their "plague of rats" con. But lately, the rats have become restless, determined that there must be more to intelligence than this, and they've grown too clever
for Maurice's oily tongue to dissuade them. They ride into the small town of Bad Blintz determined that this will be their last con. But things go wrong from the
moment they arrive. Bad Blintz, it seems, is already in the grips of a terrible rat plague. Together with the mayor's daughter Malicia, a girl raised on fairy tales
who stubbornly believes her own life is a story just waiting to happen, Maurice and his companions stumble upon a secret lurking in the dark places beneath the town -
and a terrible danger that might devour Bad Blintz, and the rest of the land, alive.
REVIEW: Technically part of the Discworld series, this book reads fine as a stand-alone novel. Pratchett's trademark humor cleverly masks a tale with some real shadows and bite to it at several turns. Maurice and the rats find themselves struggling with the dilemmas of their new-found sentience, dilemmas which the human characters are no better at dealing with for all that they were born with so-called higher intelligence. The story moves quickly, taking some unexpected twists and turns on its way to a satisfying conclusion. I was in the mood for a fun-hearted fantasy; I got that, and perhaps a little more, here.
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Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer, YA Fiction - A young criminal mastermind sets out to con the underground Fairy Nation out of its gold)
Lion Boy (Zizou Corder, YA Fiction - A boy who can talk to cats sets out to find his abducted parents)
The Folktale Cat (Frank de Caro, editor, Nonfiction - Cat folktales and legends from around the world)
The Tale of Despereaux (Kate DiCamillo, YA Fiction - A young mouse who defies his people's cowardly ways is thrown to the dungeon rats of the castle)
Cat-a-Lyst (Alan Dean Foster, Fiction - An actor's cat knows more than she's telling about a portal to a world of modern-day Incas)
Warriors: Into the Wild (Erin Hunter, YA Fiction - A housecat finds his destiny among a local band of ferals)
Redwall (Brian Jacques, YA Fiction - An orphan mouse boy at Redwall Abbey helps save the animals from the evil rat Cluny the Scourge)
Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria (Rahma Krambo, YA Fiction - A housecat must help defend a powerful book from evil forces)
My Sparkling Misfortune (Laura Lond and Alla Alekseyeva, YA Fiction - Seeking vengeance against a prince, a villainous lord finds himself stuck with a do-gooder spirit helper)
Catfantastic I - IV (Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg, editors, Ficton - Anthologies of sci-fi and fantasy cat stories)
The King of the Cats and Other Feline Fairy Tales (John Richard Stephens, Nonfiction - Fairy tales and folk stories of cats from around the world)
The Dragonback Adventures (Timothy Zahn, YA Fiction - A boy thief, raised by an interstellar con-man and safecracker, finds himself with an unexpected partner, the honorable poet-warrior Draycos)
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The Bromeliad Trilogy
(Books 1 - 3)
Terry Pratchett
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Sci-Fi
****
DESCRIPTION: Nomes are tiny people, scarcely four inches high, who live at a faster rate than humans. Though the oldest rarely exceed 10 or 12 years, to them it seems
as long as a human lifetime. For thousands of years they have lived in the shadows of human civilization, but over time have lost the extraordinary secret of their true
origins.
Masklin is one of the last nomes alive in the hostile English countryside. With his companions, he makes a desperate gambit for survival in climbing aboard a truck. By luck or
fate, the truck takes them to a large department store where thousands of nomes live in relative luxury on the leavings of humans. To them, the Store is all, and there is no
Outside. After all, does it not state in their most sacred scriptures that the great Arnold Bros (est. 1905) put All Things under One Roof, and if All Things are in the Store,
then there can't be anything left over beyond it, can there? The existence of Outside nomes is enough of a problem for the clannish, infighting Store families, but Masklin also
bears a greater threat: the Thing, a mysterious indestructible black box passed down through the generations, which carries (unknown to them) the secret of the nomish race's
past... and perhaps their only hope at a future.
This was originally published as three books:
Truckers - Masklin and his companions arrival at the Store and discover news of the Store's impending demolition, a heresy which many Store nomes refuse to believe.
Diggers - After the Store is destroyed, the displaced nomes move into an abandoned quarry that's about to be reopened.
Wings - Masklin, the Abbot Gurdur (a firm believer in the benevolent Arnold Bros) and the machine-infatuated Angelo take a risky trip across the ocean for the salvation of
all nomekind, guided by the peculiar Thing.
REVIEW: I found this in the Young Adult section, and a bright kid (especially one with a grasp of satire) should enjoy it, but really it's not specifically for children. Pratchett is the author of the famously satirical Discworld fantasy series (of which I've only read one book, which was quite amusing.) Bromeliad has satire, plus adventure, interesting characters and some humor. The humor relied a little too much on the literal-minded nomish (mis)interpretation of human writings for me, but still it was amusing. It's a fairly quick read, with some nice ideas. Younger readers will doubtless enjoy it more than I did, and be less likely to wonder why otherwise intelligent beings who have managed to decipher our language and have lived in our shadow for countless generations are utterly incapable of picking up on blatant context clues and continue to misinterpret human words and actions. At the very least, one wonders why, in all the books they've read, they never stumbled across a dictionary, which would have cleared up many of their oh-so-amusing misconceptions.
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