Something light is in order according to the reading mood I'm in right now. NO GRIM STUFF! For some reason there's a version of this listing Seymour Reit as the author. I changed that, assuming it was a boo-boo.

This is my second mouse-focused fantasy book. The first was "Redwall" "Stuart Little" is not about a mouse, though most people seem to think it is. As I recall it, the description given of Stuart is "a little boy who looked a lot like a mouse."

This is the kind of book I need to be reading right now. Easy to read and straightforward! My mental state's a bit shaky and this one's carrying me along nicely. Despite this being early-teen/late kid's lit there are some grim doings. Mostly involving a hideous farm cat. Cat's are born killers. They kill literally millions of small animals and birds every year. A shame ...

Finished last night with this perfectly satisfying read. A book that inspires and encourages compassion and acceptance. Lest one assume it's just for little kids, some bad stuff does happen and critters do die, some in rather nasty ways. Not great literature, but good kids literature.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Rats of NIMH #1), Robert C. O'Brien

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a 1971 children's book by Robert C. O'Brien. the story was adapted for film in 1982 as The Secret of NIMH.

Mrs. Frisby is the head of a family of field mice. Her son Timothy is ill with pneumonia just as the farmer Mr. Fitzgibbon begins preparation for spring plowing in the garden where the Frisby family lives.

Normally she would move her family, but Timothy would not survive the cold trip to their summer home.

Mrs. Frisby obtains medicine from her friend Mr. Ages, an older white mouse. On the return journey, she saves the life of Jeremy, a young crow, from Dragon, the farmer's cat– the same cat who killed her husband, Jonathan.

Jeremy suggests she seek help in moving Timothy from an owl who dwells in the forest. Jeremy flies Mrs. Frisby to the owl's tree, but the owl says he cannot help, until he finds out that she is the widow of Jonathan Frisby. He suggests that Mrs. Frisby seek help from the rats who live in a rosebush near her. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و نهم ماه اکتبر سال 2017میلادی

عنوان: خانم فریزبی و موش‌های صحرایی؛ نویسنده: رابرت سی اوبراین؛ تصویرگر زنا برن اشتاین؛ مترجم: نگار شاطریان؛ تهران: انتشارات دنیای اقتصاد، کتابهای دارکوب‏‫، 1395؛ در 255ص؛ مصور، شابک 9786008004639؛ موضوع داستانهای نوجوانان از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م‬‬

عنوان: خانم فریزبی؛ نویسنده رابرت سی. اوبراین ؛ مترجم: پرستو پورگیلانی ؛ ویراستار: فرزین سوری؛ تهران پیدایش، ‏‫1398؛ در 328ص؛ شابک 9786222440176؛‬

زمستان به سر آمده، و روز شخمزنی مزرعه نزدیک است؛ «خانم فریزبی» و چهار بچه موشش، که خانه شان در همان مزرعه است، چاره ای ندارند جز اینکه، همانند هر سال، از مزرعه اسباب کشی کنند؛ چون یکی از همین روزها، سر و کله ی تراکتور صاحب مزرعه، پیدا میشود، و غرش کنان چنگک تیزش را، درون خاک میکشد، و گام به گام مزرعه را زیر و رو میکند؛ در آن روز هیچ حیوانی نمیتواند، از مزرعه جان سالم به در ببرد، و تمام خانه ها، و لانه های زمستانی، ویران میشوند؛ اما امسال مشکلی وجود دارد: پسر کوچک «خانم فریزبی» بیمار است؛ اگر در آن هوای سرد، اسباب کشی کنند، بدون شک او خواهد مرد، و اگر اسباب کشی نکنند، همگی جان خود را از دست میدهند؛ روز شخم زنی هر لحظه نزدیکتر میشود؛ تا اینکه «خانم فریزبی» با «موشهای صحرایی» آشنا میشود؛ موجوداتی مرموز، از نژادی خارق العاده، و با هوش بسیار بالا، و آنها راه حل بسیار خوبی برای مشکل او پیدا میکنند...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 12/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Rats are the better humans maybe.

When I read this story aloud to students a few years ago, I remember thinking it is one of these crossover novels that speak to children and adults on different, but equally satisfying levels.

There is the human intrusion into the natural state of biology.

There is the inevitable fallout.

There is the fable.

There is the fantasy about community building.

There is the hardship and the there is the perseverance to deal with it.

There is good old adventure and storytelling.

What else can one ask of a children's book?

It also has RATS!

I suggested this book to my stepdaughter. She read a few pages and declared it to be boring. Oof, shot right to the heart. I loved this book when I was kid. LOVED. I reread it to try to figure out if there was something wrong with me, with her, or with this book.

Decision--nothing wrong with any of us. I read the first few pages and realized why this doesn't appeal to her. It's a bit of a slow start and, my apologies to kids these days, I don't think most kids these days have the same level of patience that we used to. I could definitely see why this book appealed to me back in the day, and it's the same thing that appeals to me now--Mrs. Frisby and all of the main characters (Mr. Ages, Nicodemus, Justin, etc.) are all so darn practical. And smart. And do what's best. They're so GOOD. And I always loved the crazy rat experiments that made them super smart and never aging (they even tricked the scientist!). I also always loved that this crazy adventure was happening essentially in some person's backyard to a bunch of little animals. Spring season plowing kicks off everything, a story that includes poisoning (multiple times), death (by cat, electrocution, and...poisoning), questions of ethics (should the rats keep stealing from the farmer as rats do...or should they begin to farm in their own wonderful utopian society they create in some fabulously beautiful valley?), and I already talked about the rat experiments. This book has it all, even a cliffhanger that makes me want to run out and find the sequel, which strangely enough, I can't remember reading as a kid. I hope it doesn't disappoint.

I loved this book so much as a young teen, I read it over and over and over. This is probably the book that started me off on my lifelong love of fantasy, together with Watership Down.

I re-read this as part of my MacHalo Reading Challenge 2016, 4. Re-reading a childhood favourite.

The beginning was a little boring and the very traditional gender roles of the mice annoyed me a bit at first. But once Mrs. Frisby met the rats and they told her their story, the book picked up a lot. I had forgotten a lot of the storyline. Some parts were pretty exciting, others emotional. There was drama, angst, a good plot, suspense... A nice rollercoaster.

In the end I liked the story so much that I wouldn't mind reading a sequel, to find out how the story continues for our heroes.

5 stars. I really enjoyed this story. It was not what I expected at all! I loved how the rats were presented as really nice, since they are usually presented as nasty, especially to mice. The Frisbys were all so sweet and real. I LOVED Justin, and Brutus… <33 And I could’t help liking Paul and his little brother. I loved how realistic the story was. And that bittersweet ending… oh my word. And the writing style is just so sweet and well done. Another lovely all-ages book & family read-aloud. <3

A Favourite Quote: There was a smell of dampness in the air as the frosted ground thawed, a smell of things getting ready to grow.
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “Poor little thing, he’s frightened. Look at how he’s trembling.”
“What kind of a biologist are you?” said Dr. Schutlz. “The ‘poor little thing’ is a she, not a he.”

The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!)
#16: One of your favorite books as a child

I read some advice recently that said that to lessen the burnout and stress so many of us are feeling during the pandemic right now, it can be helpful to re-read a beloved book from childhood and wallow in the pleasant nostalgia the experience creates; and this is why I thought it'd be nice to add this task to my 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge, because I know there's a lot of other people suffering from catastrophic burnout these days besides just me. And what do you know, it worked! One of my three all-time favorite books as a kid (the others being Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), this 1971 novel by longtime National Geographic contributor Robert Conly (writing here under the pen-name Robert C. O'Brien) is remarkable precisely for how naturalistic he portrays the talking animals in his tale -- other than their ability to speak English, the various mice, cats, crows, owls and other creatures found around this New England farm community behave exactly in the way that children might observe their real-life counterparts in the real-life wild, lending his universe a verisimilitude that makes it easier to get sucked into the story than if they were all wearing tiny little human outfits and driving tiny little human vehicles (despite lazy illustrators for later editions depicting exactly that).

That makes it all the more jarring, then, when we discover that there's a group of rats on the edge of the farm that can do exactly that, manipulate human machinery and read and write themselves; and that sets us upon the flashback-told adventure that takes up half the book's page count, involving secret experiments at the nearby National Institute of Mental Health that turned out wildly more successful than they had even guessed (inspired, I just learned today, by actual intelligence experiments conducted by John Calhoun at the real-life NIMH from the 1940s through '60s), leading to super-intelligent rats who manage to escape the facility before their human overlords have even guessed that the rats are smart enough to do so. This is then intercut with a contemporary, more mundane, but still thrilling adventure on the farm itself, as our plaintive widowed titular mouse hero discovers that one of her children is too sick to make their semi-annual pilgrimage from their winter home in the farmer's garden to their summer home in the nearby creek, threatening to kill the family when the farmer decides to do his spring plowing in another five days, and must approach the secretive and intimidating rat colony for help.

The whole thing just really set my imagination on fire when I was a little kid, whether that's the brilliant reveal back at the lab that the rats can now not only read the "TREE" flashcard the scientists have made for them, but now the tiny fine-print parking lot sign in the background of the tree photograph; or the exquisitely logical way that O'Brien establishes the circumstances by which these super-intelligent rats manage to obtain rat-sized tools and rat-sized motors and undetected access to electricity in the first place; or the way he ends the story on an ambiguous, open-ended note, encouraging his child readers to write their own further adventures in their heads for our crafty rats and their unknown future fate. (Wow, what I wouldn't have given as a kid to visit the secluded, mountain-surrounded eden where the rats were heading at the end of the book, where it's intimidated that they had the ability to possibly create an eventual entire town for a thousand creatures, complete with industrial agriculture and a hydroelectric dam.) It does everything a children's book is supposed to in a perfect world -- entertain, inspire, instruct, promote creativity and intelligence, build an expansive mythos -- and reading it at the age of 51 was exactly the kind of transformative journey away from the pandemic and back into my childhood that I was precisely hoping it would be. In this spirit, I encourage you to re-read your own favorite childhood tale soon; and if you've never read this one, I strongly recommend that you do so for the first time, even if you're a cynical little burned-out middle-ager like myself.

Awesome. Science-fiction elements are there, but not overdone. This book is pretty child-friendly. A great read.

“When you’ve lived in a cage, you can’t bear not to run, even if what you’re running towards is an illusion.”



I grew up watching Don Bluth's animation movie The Secret of NIMH, and I had no idea this was a book. Then I found this little second-hand book on Amazon and I knew I had to read it! This story is just so much fun. I love those children's books told from the perspective of animals, because it really forces you to change your point of view when approaching a story (those poor mice really live every single day of their life avoiding to get killed! No wonder they get heart failure poor little creatures).



As I said, this book was a lot of fun bur honestly, I like the movie more. It might be because of Don Bluth's genius; but I also didn't like the illustrations in the book (all mice and rats look exactly the same) and I didn't think the author did such a great job imagining how a rat would think and act in this particular situation. I don't think I will go on with the series, but I still love this story because of childhood memories, so I can't help but rating this book so high. I have a soft heart ahah!

Charming and classic. A cozy read, yet exciting at the same time. I wish I would have experienced this as a child and had been able to share it with my children when they we younger.

Newbery Medal 1972

This classic ages so well because it's told in strong, simple prose and has clear-eyed heroes you can root for. A fantastic, original story.

I grew up watching the movie, the Secret of Nimh, in the 80's and 90's, but had never read the book. We read it aloud as a family and my kids were skeptical about it going in, but every night they begged for one more chapter. It was a fun ride learning about the rats of NIMH and there was a lot of suspense wondering what would happen to them.