[Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH]

#707
[Title: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH]
Author: Robert C. O'Brien
Publisher: Aladdin Books
Year: 1971/1986
240 pages

BEFORE:
The serendipitous and simultaneous purchase of Rat Girl: A Memoir and Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue at the National Discount Rituals to Mark the Death of Borders was neither unremarked (by others) nor uncelebrated (alas, by me alone). I realized that I had other rat books at home, enough for a thematic rat shelf. Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever, Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, and Guthrie's Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology (Allyn & Bacon Classics Edition), Second Edition would be nicely complemented by Hersh and Stolzenburg. I am the type of person who rearranges some of the shelves to see if you are paying attention: Less Than Zero to Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home. The Sound and the Fury, The Red and the Black, The Cook and the Carpenter. Organization by spectrum. Spines depicting faces. I'm like the Kliban cartoon captioned "Just give Alice some pencils and she will stay busy for hours."

In the night I bolted up in a cold sweat. It was actually a hot sweat, but the room was cold. I cried out, but using my inside inside voice, "What about Mrs. Frisby?!" I had read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, twice. Surely I had a copy. Where else would I have read it? Not at a friend's house. Let's face it, my friends have kids who move right from Heather Has Two Mommies to Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. They eschew the Frisbys and The Borrowers and Caddie Woodlawn. I, too, had skipped directly from Little House in the Big Woods to Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology and History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine "Firsts" in Recorded History. In fact, I lost points on an IQ test in high school when I answered the question "Who is the god or goddess of dreams?" with "Geshtinana, the divine poetess and dream interpreter." Apparently when your guidance counselor answers "In which mythology?" with "Any," she doesn't mean Sumerian. I'd have known the correct answer if those Percy Jackson books had been published, but they were decades in the future. The point is, I skipped most children's and middle readers' books, returning to them only as an adult.

I have a hard time with library books, too. There's something about a library book that makes me want to eat it rather than read it. I don't like the time pressure. Sometimes a book needs to deliquesce on my shelf for 3 or 4 years before it is sufficiently ripe. So where had the copy of Mrs. Frisby I mostly undoubtedly had had gone to?

I don't know, and I don't care. I picked up a used copy for $2 today. I will re-read it soon. At that time, my review will follow this exposition. My rat shelf is sufficient until I acquire a copy of Doctor Rat, which I began but never finished when I was 15 and worked at a library.

AFTER:
As a child, I was troubled by the lack of verisimilitude in Stuart Little. It wasn't the invisible car that bothered me, but the idea that a human could give birth to a mouse and even notice. I was aware, even as a tot, on account of my mad reading skillz, that baby mice were born in littlers, not singly, and that a litter of mousie pups would fit in a spoon. I merely mention this to demonstrate that I am a discerning reader who can suspend my disbelief when warranted. I was willing to believe that good commie rats can form an anarcho-syndicalist collective and live off the land, while bad capitalist rats get zapped by their own electricity. Or at least, that is how I read the moral.