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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
adventurous
lighthearted
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
I loved this book (Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) as a kid and wanted to revisit it. It’s still very charming and clever, but I think it would have maybe made more of a compelling story to actually have the NIMH laboratory adventure in real time and THEN the story of the rats helping Mrs. Frisby. Instead the book is all about Mrs. Frisby seeking help and hearing anecdotally about the rats and how they came to be extraordinary. I just felt like there could have been more to it, more of a series from the jump. But it’s still a classic!!
There are a handful of childhood experiences that I didn't have yet were commonly enjoyed by a lot of my peers. For example, I never saw the movie "The Secret of NIMH." I'm constantly met with expressions of disbelief that I somehow missed out on this. I also never read the book, either.
So, to mark the grand, liberating end of graduate school, this book was the first one I picked up. After getting through finals week, passing comps, and then passing my license exam, I seriously just wanted something light to read. And while this book would certainly be categorized as light, I did still observe some really deep, meaningful content in this book. Those are the best children's books, though, yeah? The kind that still manage to sneak in some real adult shit between the expressions of fantasy and whimsy?
This was truly a sweet, gentle story. To be honest, though, I read through the book with nervousness as I feared an inevitable demise of some character to advance the plot. These are benign, lovable woodland creatures, so the story just seemed set up to use my compassion against me. But then again, maybe that anxiety emerged here because The Noble Death is such a tired, leaned on trope that it's hard to imagine stories these days that don't utilize it. And while there is death within this story, I didn't feel that it was cheap or manipulative. Gosh, it was almost kind of jarring how much time *wasn't* spent dwelling on the moments of death in this story.
Death is no obstacle on the farm. Life goes on.
Death-positivity aside, I couldn't help but to read the book as a critique of labor/industry economies. Granted, I would not have had this critical lens at my disposal if I hadn't recently been reading some conversations on Twitter about the philosophical conflict between North American Indigenous folx and socialism, so it was unexpectedly timely to read this book after having been exposed to that new (to me, at least) perspective. And I do think that the philosophy of the Rats of NIMH really is a rebuke to economic systems that depend on extractive resources and labor. The rats' big lofty Plan is that they intend to migrate to another land in order to begin living in a sustainable, organic way after coming to realize that heretofore they've been organizing their livelihood based on how much they're able to steal from the Fitzgibbons' farm, and they weren't really down with being a society of thieves . A society that is only sustained because of how much it can steal and plumb from an adjacent society? Sure smells like colonialism to me!
And I don't even know if this book was intended to be an allegory for anti-colonialist, anti-industrial movements. For sure, it's certainly not a neat allegory for that opposition, either, because the rats clearly wouldn't have been able to organize themselves in such a way without the initial experimentation and exploitation they endured at the hands of scientists, whereas in human societies it's pretty clear that there has always been an equal parts ratio between different cultures' civilization and ability to develop and survive on their own - it's just imperialists (usually white men) were antagonists to the survival of other (non-white) civilizations.
Which is why I think this book works better as comparison of theoretical models rather than as a metaphor for, say, the ways that kidnapped Africans in the Americas resisted white colonialists. To use this book to make such a one-to-one comparison is reductive and erases the fact that people in Western Africa were already civilized before the arrival of white slavers. So again, don't read this book and think this somehow tells a allegorical fantasy story of what Black or Indigenous liberation will look like. There are other, better books that do that. This is a children's story about rats and mice that I think just happens to juxtapose two economic models against each other.
But it is a really enjoyable read, and one that I think would be a lot of fun to discuss with children to see if they are able to tease out why exploiting others in order to survive should not be acceptable.
So, to mark the grand, liberating end of graduate school, this book was the first one I picked up. After getting through finals week, passing comps, and then passing my license exam, I seriously just wanted something light to read. And while this book would certainly be categorized as light, I did still observe some really deep, meaningful content in this book. Those are the best children's books, though, yeah? The kind that still manage to sneak in some real adult shit between the expressions of fantasy and whimsy?
This was truly a sweet, gentle story. To be honest, though, I read through the book with nervousness as I feared an inevitable demise of some character to advance the plot. These are benign, lovable woodland creatures, so the story just seemed set up to use my compassion against me. But then again, maybe that anxiety emerged here because The Noble Death is such a tired, leaned on trope that it's hard to imagine stories these days that don't utilize it. And while there is death within this story, I didn't feel that it was cheap or manipulative. Gosh, it was almost kind of jarring how much time *wasn't* spent dwelling on the moments of death in this story.
Death is no obstacle on the farm. Life goes on.
Death-positivity aside, I couldn't help but to read the book as a critique of labor/industry economies. Granted, I would not have had this critical lens at my disposal if I hadn't recently been reading some conversations on Twitter about the philosophical conflict between North American Indigenous folx and socialism, so it was unexpectedly timely to read this book after having been exposed to that new (to me, at least) perspective. And I do think that the philosophy of the Rats of NIMH really is a rebuke to economic systems that depend on extractive resources and labor. The rats' big lofty Plan is that they intend to migrate to another land in order to begin living in a sustainable, organic way after coming to realize that heretofore they've been organizing their livelihood based on how much they're able to steal from the Fitzgibbons' farm, and they weren't really down with being a society of thieves . A society that is only sustained because of how much it can steal and plumb from an adjacent society? Sure smells like colonialism to me!
And I don't even know if this book was intended to be an allegory for anti-colonialist, anti-industrial movements. For sure, it's certainly not a neat allegory for that opposition, either, because the rats clearly wouldn't have been able to organize themselves in such a way without the initial experimentation and exploitation they endured at the hands of scientists, whereas in human societies it's pretty clear that there has always been an equal parts ratio between different cultures' civilization and ability to develop and survive on their own - it's just imperialists (usually white men) were antagonists to the survival of other (non-white) civilizations.
Which is why I think this book works better as comparison of theoretical models rather than as a metaphor for, say, the ways that kidnapped Africans in the Americas resisted white colonialists. To use this book to make such a one-to-one comparison is reductive and erases the fact that people in Western Africa were already civilized before the arrival of white slavers. So again, don't read this book and think this somehow tells a allegorical fantasy story of what Black or Indigenous liberation will look like. There are other, better books that do that. This is a children's story about rats and mice that I think just happens to juxtapose two economic models against each other.
But it is a really enjoyable read, and one that I think would be a lot of fun to discuss with children to see if they are able to tease out why exploiting others in order to survive should not be acceptable.
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
hopeful
lighthearted
relaxing
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No