Redwall (Redwall, Book 1) by Brian Jacques
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Book Reviews of Redwall (Redwall, Book 1)
Book Review: Bought for my 11 year old son
Summary: 4 Stars
My son's 5th grade teacher recommended this book for my 11 year old son. He has really enjoyed it and now wants to continue on to the next book in the series.Book Review: It Could Be Worse, But I'll Skip the Sequels
Summary: 2 Stars
This quasi-Medieval fantasy about mouse monks, and various other small woodland beings, taking shelter in an Abbey besieged by a bandit army of rats, stoats and ferrets, is good enough to make me wish it were better, but not good enough to make me read more of the series.
One flaw is the descriptive writing. Despite an imaginative premise, the author rarely gives enough info to let the reader form a picture in his mind. For instance, a horse with cart galloped past our heroes as they traveled on a road, and it was not until a chapter later that I was able to determine that the horse was traveling in the opposite direction than I had imagined. A more lasting problem is imagining the relative scale of the various animals and their surroundings. Though much of the action takes place in Redwall Abbey, I was more than halfway through the book before I managed to resolve the nagging question of how large the Abbey was relative to its inhabitants, wasting many of the images I had formed in my early reading. Turns out that though these Mice are normal mouse-size (they are smaller than rats, 400 of whom can fit in a horse cart), the Abbey they live in is human-sized (with outer walls over 20 feet high, and an even higher Abbey roof). But even this left me with nagging unresolved questions of what sort of doors these mice open, and what sort of steps they climb, in what sort of rooms they hold their feasts, and how they could possibly defend so large a structure. At other times, the author seems to switch to the idea that these are human-sized animals living in a Giant-sized Abbey, as when he assumes that a fall from a wall or roof will almost always mean instant death for a rat or mouse.
Another major flaw is the sloppy, lazy plotting, by which the author just forces one event to follow another. Here's a very early example: Cluny, the evil leader of the villainous rat horde, asks for a private audience with the Abbot, and in order to achieve this, permits himself to stripped of weapons, separated from his horde, and ushered into the Abbey. Having thus rendered himself helpless, he proceeds to tell the Abbot "surrender immediately, or I'll kill you all". The incensed Abbot knows the horde will be helpless and disorganized without their leader, but honorably decides not to kill the helpless villain, instead permitting him to leave and continue his siege. The explanation offered for the Villain's inexplicable risk-taking is that he knew the mice were too honorable to harm a guest. But it is odd for Evil to have such mighty faith in Virtue. Why take the risk? Why not have his herald shout out these simple terms? Why did Cluny need the private audience. The answer, it turns out, is simply that, unbeknownst to Cluny, the Author needed an plot device to get Cluny into the Great Hall of the Abbey so he could see a certain Tapestry which will later haunt his dreams.
The lazy plotting cannot be forgiven by claiming this story is a fantasy and a children's story. When an author puts more effort into a story, plotting it carefully, it does not make the story harder to read -- quite the reverse. True, kids are undemanding critics, less likely than adults to notice flaws, but that does not mean we should throw trash at them.
Another problem I have is with the story's morality. On the plus side, it is not clear that it is completely amoral, like, some children's literature these days. On the other hand the morality is, as another reviewer put it, "underdeveloped." In this, it is roughly on the level of the Harry Potter books (though ultimately more violent and bloodthirsty). It has a sort of Ron-Harry-Hermione syndrome, wherein the central hero is flanked, on the one hand, by more bloodthirsty and amoral friends (such as Constance) who do his dirty work for him, and on the other hand by a more restrained friend (here, the Abbot), whose moral scruples are treated as a lovable character flaw. Our hero (or the reader) gets to have it both ways, participating vicariously both in the viciousness and the virtues of his various friends, without having to stand up to any of them or make any real moral choices.
I was, however, particularly disturbed by the central hero's mistreatment of a female sparrow prisoner, wherein an oath extracted under torture and threat of death leads instantly to a Stockholm-syndrome type friendship.
The author makes the villains ridiculously exaggerated. Their zeal for wickedness transcends self-serving evil-doing and crashes headlong into self-destructive stupidity. This ploy makes it easy enough to contrast villains with heroes, but it obscures, rather than highlights, any real moral awareness. A related issue is that heroes and cartoon villains are neatly divided by animal species. Rats, Foxes, Ferrets and Stoats are all automatically Evil. The Mice, Squirrels and Moles are simply Good, and any flaws they may have seem to be regarded merely as amusing character traits.
My problem is not that Jacques has written a violent tale featuring death and killing. It is a mistake to criticize violence in the abstract without regard to whether the violence is justified. But it still seems to me that the author botched a golden opportunity to give these such issues a better treatment.
Book Review: The Only anti-Redwall Review You'll Probably ever Read
Summary: 2 Stars
Since seventh grade I've heard nothing but accolades for Brian Jacques's Redwall and have never read it. Now i'm ten years older and a quarter of the way through the book, and i'm bored to tears. For about fifteen minutes I've searched high and low through book reviews seeing if anyone else in the world dislikes it quite like I do, and the result leaves me a little lonely. Am I an ogre? First, there's only so much rodent chivalry I can handle. If you're going to write a book about mice and badgers, make it more than exceptional. Now, The Wind in the Willows, that was quality animal fiction. I suppose if animals are talking and carrying on like humans in any story, it has to be above average to get me to enjoy it. I'm more willing to care about characters in a story if they're bigger than my thumb.
I mean, I find fieldmice just as cute as the next person finds them, but, I'd rather see them scuttling across a dirt road doing normal mouse things, like eating, not thinking, and scaring the mercy out of my Grandmother. (Not that I want to see my Grandmother terrified...)
Beyond that, as other reviewers pointed out, the story is a little hard to follow. Where exactly is the Abbey? How are things laid out? Is Matthias allowed to love Cornflower because he's a mouse monk? (Is he even a mouse monk? I mean, he wears a habit...) Perhaps that's not how it works in Redwall. And perhaps I have to read further. But, I think I will have to stick with Catcher in the Rye.
I feel like Will Smith in "I am Legend" calling out for anyone around him, if you are out there, and you also did not like this book, though it may seem like it...YOU are not alone.
Book Review: Cute critters, graphic violence
Summary: 2 Stars
This book occupies an odd place on the "children's book" shelf: it attracts young readers with mice and other forest cutesies but delivers action that is often graphically cruel--way beyond kid-book level, in my opinion. And yet the characters seem too cutesy to attract older readers. After seeing too many times the tears and the shock on my 8-year-old's face, I felt the need to gloss over some of the graphically violent stuff,despite my aversion to censorship of any kind. I wouldn't recommend this one for anyone under 11 or 12, and only then if readers/listeners don't mind fuzzy little forest creatures getting graphically impaled, drowned, and/or crushed alive.Book Review: A better bet for young readers
Summary: 2 Stars
I don't know why, but I just couldn't get into this book. The idea of anthropomorphic animals in a mythic battle with one another is interesting to me, and the series comes very highly recommended. However, I just didn't find it terribly entertaining. The quest for Martin the Warrior's sword was slightly more appealing, but I was merely skimming the long descriptions of rat vs. mouse skirmishes. Possibly I might have enjoyed it more had I read it as a younger person, but I do read a lot of YA fiction, and am not generally disappointed.