Led to good conversations with my twin 10yo granddaughters, with whom I read it on a beach vacation. And the slowness of the story was accented by the slowness of the audiobook narrator and very long pauses. There are really two stories going on at once; O'Brien cleverly brings the two together slowly by revealing their connection detail by detail through an absorbing flashback. Jonathan and Ages were the only two survivors of a group of eight mice who had been part of the experiments at NIMH and made the rats' escape possible. I must confess I still pick it up every decade or so and read it again, for the sheer pleasure in such a simple but compelling story.

Surprisingly thoughtful book about education, ethics, community and obligations to ourselves, our family, our tribe, and the larger world. A television series based on the books was in development at Fox as an event series in September 2021. I did think it was interesting that even in the world of rodents that the males held all the power and made all the decisions. Normally she would move her family, but Timothy would not survive the cold trip to their summer home.Even better than I remembered, and now I have to read the sequel to find out what happened to everybody.

It was the movie edition which means it was the same story but with pictures from the Don Bluth film adaptation in middle. The character of Jenner is made a villain who is still present with the rats, rather than having left them before the story begins. I was so into this book, I made my mom take me to the library where I checked it out so I could read ahead to find out what was coming.Frisby made me realize how many strong single mother figures I had in stories and entertainment as a child. Frisby just happens to hear the humans talking about drastic things they were going to do and when they were going to do them. Frisby, a recently widowed mouse, lives with her four children in a cinder block, in a field belonging to a farmer named Mr. They're 8 and 11, not native speakers (though quite fluent by now), and the three of us thoroughly enjoyed this book, absolutely loved it. When the exterminators fill the rat hole with poisonous gas, eight of the ten rats manage to escape, while the remaining two die in the hole.

A group of rats, led by one named Jenner, rejected this plan and left the nest at some point before Frisby's arrival. In a retrospective essay about the Newbery Medal-winning books from 1966 to 1975, children's author John Rowe Townsend wrote: "It seems to me that the fact that all the animals talk and behave intelligently from the beginning of the story detracts from the spectacular development of the laboratory rats. We live just three houses down from a farm, so we frequently have the pleasure of hearing a goat bleat or having a curious horse reach their head over the fence for a quick nuzzle. A culture of fear began to grow surrounding unethical medical and scientific practices, which are heavily reflected in the book.The rats of NIMH come up with a brilliant solution to Mrs Frisby's problem and she, in turn, renders them a great service, but the rats are in danger too, and little by little Mrs Frisby discovers their extraordinary past . I got the book again later in life and this has culminated in reading it aloud to my 5 yr old son (*with only a few slight edits/explanations of the more complicated passages).