#oa:3

*If You Are A Rat Nabbed By Cats Who Really Like Stories About Magic Spoons, Wolves With Snout-Warts, Big, Hairy Chimney Trolls ... And Cookies Too

Hi everyone, I have another rat review. Normally I like to do the format of 1) post title, 2) little quip, 3) picture of the cover of the book, and then I actually start the review in earnest. This time, it's just the subtitle of the book because that's joke enough as-is.

This book is written by Mary Hanson, illustrated by John Hendrix, and published in 2007. And yes, the full title is How to Save Your Tail* *if you are a rat nabbed by cats who really like stories about magic spoons, wolves with snout-warts, big, hairy chimney trolls ... and cookies too.

It's certainly a title of a book! I might have used a semicolon or two, but it gets the job done.

Anyway, this is a book meant for ages 6 to 10. It's about a rat named Bob, who gets caught by a pair of cats and prolongs his life by telling fairy tales that happened within his family. He also loves baking cookies, and they have periodic cookie breaks between stories.

It's not bad, for what it is. It's not problematic in any major ways, which is more than some kids' books can say. I am not the intended audience, but I'm sure lots of kids would enjoy it. And making reading fun is very important!

There's some nice remixes of fairy tales. I like that sort of thing. Yeah, what if the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk were also Puss in Boots? I've never seen that done before. That's fun.

There is a warthog king who does turn into a frog after a kiss, and he does then have many children with Bob's grandmother. They're explicit about the babies being frog-rats.

I think a lot more writers need that confidence. You can literally make anything happen in your story so you might as well reveal that the protagonist is 1/4 frog. Readers will deal with it.

The illustrations are nice. There's a handy little family tree at the start, which has a dual purpose. Yes, it's a reference while you read, but it's also a strong hook. "Why did some of Mozzarella and Basil's other children die of heartbreak or lead lives of crime? What's going on with Clinkenbeard, Elvis, and Mush?"

Now, I don't expect people to read this book. But, this is my job, so I'll use this as a chance to talk about rat tropes in general.

Yes, real cats shouldn't eat cookies. But I assume whatever magic lets them talk and cook food also makes it fine that they're having chocolate.

I appreciate that Bob is a rat, not a mouse. One reason rats tend to be villainous in fairy tales is actually down to translation. Even if a language originally didn't distinguish between "rat" and "mouse", people converting stories to English often give more heroic roles to mice. See The Lion and the Mouse (where the modest prey animal actually saves the King of the Jungle) or The Rat and the Oyster (where a foolish creature dies for its arrogance).

The stories we tell about mice and rats are sort of chicken-and-the-egg with our cultural view of them. Because we see rats as less likeable, we cast them in less-likeable roles, which makes them seem less likeable...

This is due to a few things, including the fact that mice have shorter snouts and big ears. People find them cuter, on average. They also feel less troublesome. Not only do they eat less food because they're smaller, their traces are less obvious than the ways rats feed.

So, yeah, people can make mice seem more heroic by contrasting them with rats. Bob didn't have to be a rat, and in fact, it's more likely that cats would prey on mice. Rats are oftentimes a little too big for them. So, good on you, Mary Hanson and John Hendrix!

Rats were spared, this time. But they kind of passed the buck on to shrews. Bob's aunt Griselda has a kind of Cinderella situation with an evil stepmother and stepsister. She gets blessed(?) with gems that appear for every word she says, while her wicked stepsister is cursed to make snakes and toads appear when she says nasty things. And of course one of the snakes eats them both. These are fairy tales, so the punishment for being unvirtuous is death.

I mean, it makes sense. "Shrew" and "shrewish" are used as insults, just like "rat". Sorry, Soricidae fans.

But the peak of the book has to be the forcefem.

So, the final story Bob tells is his own. His aunt had a cruel stepmother and stepsister, but technically the riff on Cinderella is this one. There's a witch's apprentice named Cindy, and Bob lives in the hearth. It sucks because he loves reading but the witch's only book is Hansel and Gretel and Other Recipes. (That got a chuckle out of me.)

So anyway, Charming's parents throw a ball because they're scared he won't ever meet someone. Cindy makes a wish, a fairy godmother appears, but she's new to the job. She abandons Cindy, and leaves her spellbook behind.

Bob tries to help out, and gets the spell wrong.

Glitter swirled about the kitchen. Bob's legs felt funny. When the air cleared, his handsome fur was gone. He was smooth and silky and much too tall. Instead of a tail and whiskers, he wore glass slippers and a blue gown. A diamond tiara encircled his head and, if truth be told, Bob was the fairest maiden in the land.

I wasn't even obsessed with rodents as a kid, but I feel like if I had read this book it would have made me feel things. Heck, it makes me feel things now. "Beautiful silken maiden who is internally a rat" is gender. Thank you for this gift, Hanson.

And of course Cindy becomes the horse. And of course the witch becomes a pumpkin.

And of course Prince Charming is way way way too into horses and so he falls in love with Cindy anyway. I love that. Good for them.

I simply cannot be the horse blog person, but ... There's a kind of enchantment about them that no other creature has. It's a well-known fact that horses are basically large rats.

So, yeah, wasn't expecting that bit. This is possibly why Bob is a rat-- it's just funnier to have the beautiful maiden secretly be a rat named Bob than if (s)he's a mouse. But, really, it's not even transphobic. Good for them!!!

And that's my review.

To be honest, I feel self-conscious with this post. More than with anything else I've reviewed, I'm embarrassed to say I enjoyed it. This book isn't at all meant for adults. It's not a well-known children's classic. It's not even presenting an educational message in an accessible way. It's "just" entertainment.

But it's also very special to me, because a friend gave me a copy. Being seen is a gift! So huge shoutout to my friend for this.

My personal rating: 4

The title, of course, is an abbreviation of “Mason Is Rats”

I’ve got another rat review! Mason’s Rats is a science fiction short story published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2006, written by Neal Asher.

It’s probably most famous for being adapted by an episode of Love Death and Robots. Honestly… as far as adaptations go, that one was quite accurate. They got the right themes, and added wonderful visuals.

It’s a short story, so this’ll be a short review. The plot is essentially: a farmer sometime in the future (presumably somewhere in England) is worried about his cats, only to find his barn has large tool-using rats inside it. He gets increasingly more expensive killing machines (kind of like a horrid If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, perhaps) as the rats fight back. Ultimately, he sides with the rats against the soulless corporation and destroys the machine he bought.

I mean, I’m not going to complain about a story like this. I’ve worked in farming, so I like the subject matter quite a bit. Especially considering this was 2006, I think it’s got a good theme. If the end of the story is anti-companies that make killing machines and pro-farmers and rats… that’s a story for me.

The writing was a little iffy in places and in need of some grammatical punch-ups, but perhaps the printing where I found the story was just low-quality. A story of low-tech people fighting the big money corpo’s isn’t unheard of, but not every story needs to be groundbreaking. Besides, it was published a while ago, so the things that feel tropey now ring differently.

Essentially: If you’re into this sort of thing, then you’ll like this thing. It’s hard to get a hold of, but it’s a worthwhile short story.

My personal rating: 3.5

Kenneth Grahame was a bottom and you can’t convince me otherwise

Today’s review is a classic little critter book— The Wind in the Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame and first published in 1908. It’s about a few forest gentlemen who are friends— Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger. They have some small adventures, and some large ones. Generally, the book is just about their lives. There's a lot of themes about travel and new horizons versus longing for home.

The prose is beautiful and very evocative. I can imagine an audiobook would be sublime. This is definitely “the kind of book I want to read to kids”.

It's also very clearly a book written before children's books were a genre. It's not afraid to use large words that children wouldn't know, possibly because it was envisioned as something that parents would read to children.

It also gives mixed signals on what size the characters are. Or what their relationship to humans is. They seem to interact with animal-animals, like a horse that pulls a cart or a bird in a cage. But they talk to the bird, and other "wild" animals which don't wear clothes or have houses. But they interact with humans, too. But there's illustrations where they're ordinary animals. But the things they do (like passing as a washerwoman to escape prison, or driving a stolen car) could only be done if they were close to human size.

Also, to address the elephant in the room... they're kinda gay. I know it's over a hundred years old. I know language shifts. I know the boundaries of acceptable male friendships have changed a lot. But the book is just a lot of gentlemen inviting each other to social outings and being dear to each other! They've got pet names. They're rowing down the river, and eating wonderful lunches together, and there's no women!

And some of the descriptions of what they do to Toad are really, uh, something. He gets deeply hyperfixated on car racing, and keeps yelling "poop poop", and they do eventually have to tie him down in his bed after a verbal lashing. The details Grahame includes, and the details he leaves out, make it hard not to imagine some kind of big polycule.

I think Toad is the strongest of the characters in the book. He's a bundle of flaws, conceited overgrown child. But also pitiful. Even though he's actively a menace to society, he's written in such a way that I can't hate him. It's an impressive balancing act. And he's so full of desire that he's always moving the story.

Mr. Rat, the Water-Rat, is notable for being a rat (not a mouse) but not greedy or villainous. He's seen as smart. It's not clear exactly what species he is, because any small-enough mammal will get called a rat or a mouse. He might even be a vole, technically? I don't know enough about the rodents in England. There is another Rat in one chapter, who's a seafarer and explicitly meant to be a brown rat / Norway rat.

They do also behold the face of God at one point. Like, they meet Pan? There's a satyr-man of the wild, and they have a religious experience, but then the memory of it is erased from their minds. It just happens one chapter and is never again addressed. Don't worry about it.

It's a lovely little fantasy, but certainly an upper-class one. That's another way it aged funnily. Constantly buying new cars after crashing them? Owning a house? In this economy? It's not like these men have jobs, they're just independently wealthy and it's never explained. How did a mole get enough money to own a house?

The villains, if there are any, are the mustelids (stoats and weasels) that take over Toad's house. If we were going to have a rat as a main character, we had to have some other species as the scapegoat bad guys, right?

There is a really bad depiction of a Romani person. But, let’s be honest, that’s not uncommon. It’s a total stereotype but could be much worse. You could probably use that chapter to start a discussion on Romani stereotypes in a lot of old books.

They also pull guns on each other. It's really all over the place. Some chapters are pastoral, some are Toad getting sentenced to jail. The ending sentence is just kind of the end of a paragraph? Children's books were not a settled genre in 1908.

Finally, one last weird-worldbuilding loredrop: Toad has hair. Last few pages of the book, Grahame casually mentions him combing his hair. Don't worry about it.

April 1st, 2024

Today’s review is a book by E. B. White. Charlotte’s Web is about a rat named Templeton and the other animals that live in a barn with him.

The opening line is sensational (like with Stuart Little). "Where's Papa going with that ax?" That's so good! It's practically the entire drama and stakes of the book, in one sentence! It's only undercut by the fact that they're not talking about Templeton the rat.

This is a talking animal book. I know you can say this about most talking animal books... but the morality is so bizarre. It's supposedly a bad thing that Wilbur might get eaten. But what about his ten siblings who they sell at 5 months old? If Charlotte the spider can have conversations, why not flies. And the barn has rat traps!

I don't love the treatment of the human girl Fern- her parents are worried about her, because she talks to animals. They talk with a doctor in one chapter, who says "oh, she'll start being interested in boys eventually". And then she does. That's the end of her story. She does grow up and stops talking with animals. Heteronormative, and really everything-normative.

The descriptions are really terrific, though. E. B. White makes me want to live in a manure pile and eat slops, because it sounds so appealing and delicious.

But let's get back to the main character.

The book was decently accurate about rats. Templeton, like real rat species, is mainly interested in food and shelter. He's not popular, but he's not unnecessarily cruel. Just very self-interested. He eats Wilbur's breakfast, he's nocturnal, and has many tunnels. He likes the dump because it has food and hiding places. That's pretty accurate.

Templeton is willing to kill a gosling, and everyone knows it. When one of the goose eggs doesn't hatch, he wants it. He doesn't have a particular purpose, he just wants to have it. I don't know as much about pack rats, but that sounds like pack rat behavior. I don't think of brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) or black rats (Rattus rattus) as huge collectors. (He is probably one of those two species.)

One of the least accurate things is that Templeton is alone. How on earth is there only one rat in this whole barn?

I was really happy for him, when he went to the county fair and got to eat a lot of food. He gets huge! But rat behavior-wise, that's not very realistic either. Some rats definitely feast on foods at big events, but one of the things that helps their species survive is that they're unwilling to try new foods (neophobic). They'll leave things alone for a long time before trying them, because they might be poison.

Even though Templeton says his stomach can handle anything, real rats are incapable of vomiting. So, they need to be very careful about what they eat. A barn rat would not try so many new foods in a new place.

[April Fools aside, this next part is actually interesting to me.]

Templeton is heroic in his own way, throughout the book. But he's not seen that way. His rotten egg bursts and scares the human boy Avery away from killing Charlotte. He finds the words for Charlotte to write in her web. When Wilbur faints from all the praise he's getting at the fair, Templeton bites him so he'll jump up and look lively. He even saves Charlotte's egg case and brings it back to the barn.

He's benefiting from this, like making a deal so he can eat Wilbur's food. But he's still arguably just as essential as Charlotte to save Wilbur's life. It's not even like spiders are so much more popular than rats. But Charlotte is "the size of a gumdrop", which is a very intentional move to make her sound unfrightening. And Templeton has "long ugly teeth".

[okay back to funny mode]

I’m not quite sure why it was called “Charlotte’s Web” and not “Templeton’s Trough”. He’s clearly the most compelling character, and I wish less time had been spent on the side characters like Wilbur the pig and Fern the human.

My rating: 3

Overall rating: 3

I just recently read Stuart Little, written in 1945 by E.B. White, so I'll review it here as my first review.

Beware! I will be talking about plot details, including the end. And a big part of the experience for me was that I didn't know where the story would go next.

Overview

    It's about a boy(?) named Stuart Little. It's hard to say much more than that, because there's no central thread. I can pitch Charlotte's Web to you: there is a pig and the barn animals, especially the spider Charlotte, are trying to keep him from getting eaten. This book, though? It's just... about Stuart Little.

    It has a really great opening line: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." In the first edition, the line is that he "was born". The book isn't very specific about whether he's a mouse, or a boy who just looks like a mouse.

 My Thoughts

I loved it, and I don't know what to make of it. I am glad such a strange book is considered a classic, even if I don't understand why. It's hilariously matter-of-fact, almost deadpan. Yeah, he could walk as soon as he was born. He's in love with a bird. There's an invisible car. Deal with it.

I really, really loved the bits about how Stuart lives. Early chapters explain how he gets clothes, how he gets around, and the challenges of raising a mouse-boy. It's actually a great message. People don't question his different needs, they just accommodate him. I could read an entire book about the challenges of being the size of a mouse in a world built for human-sized people. And I did! And I want more!

There's a great deal of attention paid to his clothes. From the first chapter: "Before he was many days old he was not only looking like a mouse but acting like one, too-- wearing a gray hat and carrying a small cane." Does E. B. White know what a mouse is? Is that the problem? A few sentences later, Mrs. Little makes Stuart "a fine little blue worsted suit with patch pockets in which he could keep his handkerchief, his money, and his keys." At another point he wears "a pepper-and-salt jacket, old striped trousers, a Windsor tie, and spectacles." And the whole book is like that. Stuart is a little gentleman. The world's smallest dandy.

     It kind of reads like E. B. White wasn't editing, at all. Pure 'yes and', no revisions. Or, it's like a group storytelling game, where everybody contributes one sentence at a time.

    After a few chapters of little adventures, he decides to run away from home to find the bird Margalo. And we never see her, or Stuart's family, again.

    There's a non sequitur chapter where he becomes a schoolteacher for a day, and I don't think it relates to anything that comes before or after.

    There's an invisible car, like I mentioned. Unironically, halfway through the book, Stuart's doctor friend gives him a miniature car that can turn invisible. What? That wasn't part of the premise!

    There's also a human girl, the same size as Stuart, in the later part of the book. Where did that come from? She's small like him, but she doesn't look like a mouse.

    It's like the reverse of Chekov's gun. Something new could be introduced at any moment, and something could be dropped at any moment.     To be crystal clear, I enjoy this. I like the unpredictability. And, it must be well-written somehow, because even with how odd it gets, I never lost my suspension of disbelief.     This would be an excellent exercise in storytelling. I'd ask children what they think will happen in the next chapter.     Even the ending is a kind of curveball: a telephone repairman talks for a long time about how great North is, as a direction. And then Stuart keeps driving.      Overall, I liked it, even if I don't know if it's well-written. It seemingly breaks a lot of rules about writing. It's profoundly weird from a storytelling perspective, so I'm glad it's somehow a popular book. I give it a 3/5 overall, and a 4/5 for me, personally. For further reading: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/21/the-lion-and-the-mouse This article talks about children's books and how Stuart Little was part of a fight over what children's book should be. Anne Carroll Moore is a fascinating historical figure. Sorry, I have no scanner, so here's some pictures of Garth Williams' illustrations.

Stuart is on a branch with the human-shaped girl, Harriet. He's dressed like a human, but he has a tail and a face like a mouse.