Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien

(Book Review)

Started: May 23, 2020
Finished: August 22, 2020

My History with this Book

Like most of my generation, my first encounter with this story was the Don Bluth movie, The Secret of Nimh.  My siblings and I saw the movie when it was shown on the Disney channel in the mid 80s  (*1) ,  (*2).  We recorded it off of TV onto VHS, and watched and re-watched it to the point of memorization.
In 5th grade, I had to read the book because our teacher chose it for our in-class reading project.  As much as I loved the movie, I was skeptical when the teacher handed out the book.  In fact, it was because I loved the movie so much that I doubted the book could give me anything new.  I felt like I knew the movie backwards and forwards, and there was no point in reading the book.
I was at the age where, despite what my parents and teachers kept telling me, I was not convinced that books were superior to movies. And I much preferred the cartoon versions of classics than the real books.  The cartoons had vibrant colors, memorable character designs, engaging slapstick and exciting action scenes.  The books just had a lot of long boring descriptions.  That plus the illustrations in the book never imprinted on me the way the cartoon versions did, and I often resented the fact that the book illustrations were trying to replace the characters I loved with blander versions. (*3)

So, when the teacher gave us the book, I was skeptical that it would give me anything that the movie hadn't already given me.
...and therefore was pleasantly surprised to find out how absorbing the book was.
The plot beats are basically the same in the book as in the movie.  (Except for the ending--we'll get into that later).  But the book immerses you in the story so much more fully.  The story of how the rats were transformed, how they escaped, and the intricate underground cavern they constructed is much more fleshed out in the book. 
5th grade was 30 years ago now (*4), so I don't remember the reading experience in detail.  I remember a few key scenes that stuck in my head (*5), but other than that I just remember the general feeling--and that general feeling was finding the details of the book fascinating despite knowing in advance what the story was (*6).
In fact, I enjoyed this book so much, that after we finished reading it as a class, I decided to continue on on by myself.  I got the sequel, Racso and the Rats of NIMH, out from the library and read that.  Unfortunately 30 years later, I don't remember anything at all about Racso and the Rats of NIMH, other than remembering that I enjoyed it (*7).

Why I'm Re-Reading This Book

So, this is actually a cross-over post with my ESL Extensive Reading project.  Meaning, I re-read this book because I was using it in the ESL classroom. 
Back in May, I took over a class of high level teenagers in General English ESL class--a demographic I've not taught since my days in Cambodia 5 years ago.  And I remembered how in the old days I used to rely a lot on Graded Readers and classroom reading when teaching teenagers.  So I thought about which books I could use with this class.  I remembered having enjoyed this book when I was in 5th grade.  It wasn't a book designed for ESL students, but these were advanced level students, and I figured that since I had read it in in elementary school, an advanced ESL student would be able to follow it.  So I set about seeing if I could track down a copy.

Finding a Copy Online
Since I'm in Vietnam, locating books is always the problem.  There wasn't a copy in my local bookstore.  So I searched the Internet to see if I could find some free PDF that someone had uploaded somewhere.  After stumbling through a few dodgy Russian websites, I eventually found a copy of this book at http://esl-bits.net/.  And then I kicked myself for not checking that website first, since I had already known about it.  In fact, I had known about esl-bits.net for several months now--ever since a co-worker had sent me the link back in October of 2019. (*8) 
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is available for free online HERE .  And so, I was able to use the text and the audio from this site to read and listen to this book in my English classes.  (I used it as a reading text in one class, and then later as an extensive listening project in 4 advanced listening classes that I taught.)

I'll talk more about my experiences using this book in an ESL classroom (for anyone who's interested) at the end.  But first, let's get into the review.

The Review (SPOILER ALERT)

I used to have a policy on this blog that I wouldn't review books that I was re-reading, and only review books that I read for the first time.  But I've decided there's no point in continuing that policy. (*9) ,(*10)

However there is always a danger when you review something that you are revisiting from childhood.  The danger is that is that you might spend the whole review saying "It wasn't as good as I remembered."

...and, yeah, in this case it wasn't quite as good as I remembered.  The rat society wasn't quite as intricate as I remembered it, the debates among the rats were not as nuanced or complicated, the conflict was not as intense, and the internal logic of the story was not as consistent as I remembered.

But before I start harping on all the things that weren't as good as I remembered, I should give this story credit for the things that made it cool in the first place.

The Good
The basic premise is really cool.  It's a classic "you never know what bizarre things can be happening right in your own backyard" type story. The Fitzgibbon family has no idea that a whole new rat civilization is developing right under their rosebush.   And then when we actually get inside the rat home, and we find out that it has electric elevators, and carpets, and a library and stained glass windows that reflect electric lights... all under this unassuming little rosebush in the middle of an ordinary farmer's yard.   It really fires up the imagination.  I think children always find fascinating these hidden little world types of stories--which also accounts for the popularity of similar stories like The Littles, or The Borrowers.  (Even revisiting it as an adult, I found it pretty cool.)

This book has also got what on first glance appears to be a crazy whacked-out premise--a group of genetically modified super-intelligent rats escape from the laboratory and create a new rat civilization.  By all rights this should result in some sort of really bad half-baked science fiction story, and in the hands of any other author, it probably would have.  But author Robert C. O'Brien takes the story seriously, and grounds everything in enough careful detail and description that you actually buy into the idea.  Before the rats are even introduced, we spend 8 chapters getting to know the garden, the farm, and the animals that live there, all in some detail, so that we have fully accepted this world before we are introduced to the bizarre premise.  There are some elements of the story that don't entirely make sense (I'll get to those down below) but at the very least the author has put enough detail into constructing the setting so that the farm feels like a very real place, and this helps the reader to buy into the rest of the story.
The backstory, describing the lab experiments and the transformation of the rats, also goes into excruciating detail.

In contrast to the movie, which covered the backstory of the rats in only 3 minutes... 

...the backstory of the Rats of NIMH takes up about one-third of the book.  There are obviously positives and negatives to spending this amount of space on backstory, but it does at least make the reader take the premise seriously.  This isn't some half-baked idea that the author just rushed out.  He's clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how the Rats of NIMH became who they were.  And the amount of detail its described in makes it feel real to the reader.

In the backstory, as with the main story, a distinction has to be made between something that feels real viscerally versus something that is entirely logically consistent.  There are plenty of individual elements of the backstory that don't make sense logically.  (I'll get to those down below).  But it still feels real because of all the effort the author has put in to describing the experience of the rats--while reading this book, you have a perfect mental picture of what the lab looked and felt like.

Another thing I  really liked about this book was how the existence super-intelligent rat civilization is treated as a huge plot twist that is only revealed after the first 11 chapters.  At first, the reader is lead to believe that the story is going to be all about Mrs. Frisby, and how she is going to save her sick child.  There are a few mysterious elements that are introduced (Who is this Mr. Ages, and how does a mouse know so much about medicinal plants? And whatever happened to Jonathan Frisby anyways?)  But the story just keeps moving on without lingering on these details, and since the narrator doesn't really spend any time worrying about these mysteries, it's not clear that the reader should care about them either.  The strange behavior of the farm rats is mentioned briefly at the end of chapter 5, but then promptly forgotten about again.  It's not until chapter 8 that the reader gets any sense that the rats are actually going to play an important part in this story, and not chapter 11 that we start to get any sense of how extraordinary these rats are. (*11)  I really like how the author surprises the reader with the plot twist in the first third of the book.

And the ideas in this book are at least somewhat intriguing.
Now, it is true that (as I mentioned above) this book isn't quite as deep as I had remembered it. The ideological discussions that the rats have about their new society weren't quite as complex as I had remembered from my childhood.  But there is at least something here nevertheless.  The brief hints that we get of what this new rat society could develop into are fun to imagine.  As Nicodemus muses (in Chapter 21):

Surely rats would have developed reading and writing, judging by the way we took to it. But what about machines? What about cars and airplanes? Maybe not airplanes. After all, monkeys, living in trees, must have felt a need to fly, must have envied the birds around them. Rats may not have that instinct.

In the same way, a rat civilization would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.

But now, we come to the parts of the book which don't hold up so well from an adult perspective.

The Stuff that Doesn't Hold Up as Well

According to Wikipedia, John Rowe Townsend once wrote of this book: "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..."

And indeed, this is also to my mind the principle sin of the book.

The root problem is that the book is trying to combine two genres.  It is both a fantasy story about talking animals, and it is a science fiction story about scientific experiments on ordinary animals.  But the two genres don't work together, for precisely the reason Townsend mentioned.  It's not really clear how the rats are qualitatively different from the other talking animals in this story.

Just the fact that all the animals in this book are able to talk is indicative that they all have advanced intelligence.  (As Steven Pinker will tell you, the ability to comprehend grammar, and use a subordinate relative clause to modify a main clause, is something that animals don't have the brain capacity to do.) 

[Actually while I'm on the subject of speech, the rules of who can understand what in this world are never very clear.  The animals can all talk in this book, and share some sort of a common language that allows all the different species to talk to each other--mice, rats, owls, crows and squirrels can all speak to each other.  The exception seems to be the cat--although this is never explicitly stated, one gets the impression that the cat is just a dumb beast, and not part of the intelligent animal society.  (*12) , (*13) , (*14) The animals can all understand what the humans say, so apparently they all know English.  I'm guessing the humans can't understand what the animals say, (although no attempt at communicating with the humans is ever made during the book, so it's unclear.) ]

But it would be one thing if the miracle of speech was the only thing we had to overlook.  If talking animals were in most other respects animals, who live primitive lives largely by instinct, then the addition of the Rats from NIMH would be more impressive. But the other animals are not simple primitives.  They seem to understand the rules of politeness and society. They live in houses that have hallways, bedrooms, and they sleep in beds with blankets. (*15)

The rats advanced civilization, when we finally get to see it, is impressive, but at the same time it's not really all that big of a leap from the way the other animals are living anyway.

The animals also all seem to know a lot about how human society is organized.  At one point (Chapter 16: The Maze), Nicodemus tells Mrs. Frisby:

Dr Schultz was a neurologist — that is, an expert on brains, nerves, intelligence, and how people learn things. He hoped, by experimenting on us, to find out whether certain injections could help us to learn more and faster. The two younger people working with him, George and Julie, were graduate workers in biology. 

I got the impression reading this that this was information Nicodemus had deduced even before his intelligence had been enhanced--although maybe he knows this only through hindsight (it's not clear.)  But then, how is Mrs. Frisby (who is just a normal mouse), supposed to know what injections are, or what a neurologist is, or what graduate workers in biology are?  Especially considering Mrs. Frisby has never been off the farm.  And these kind of assumptions--assumptions that the simple animals understand complex things about human society-- are all throughout the book.

The only thing that really makes the rats different from the other animals is that they can read, and that they know how to use electricity.  And even here it's not entirely clear-cut, because Mrs. Frisby has learned to read a little bit--not as fast as the rats, but she can still make out words, so at least the concept of reading is achievable for the normal animals.  And once it's established that the concept is achievable, then it's even more unclear why the rats are different.
And given that Mrs. Frisby and the other animals are consistently characterized as having human level intelligence, one certainly gets the impression that there's nothing to prevent Mrs. Frisby from learning about electricity if it was simply explained to her.

In other words, the central premise of the book doesn't really work within the world that this book takes place in.  

This is something that as a kid I noticed, but I was able to push it to the side of my mind so that it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story.

As an adult, however, I have a much harder time pushing this to the side of my mind.  I wanted to enjoy this story, and take its world seriously, but every few pages some huge logical problem just kept popping up.

There's an intriguing line in the book that suggest that the rats may not just be smart--they might be super smart--smarter than even the scientists who created them. (From Chapter 18: "We’re something Dr Schultz has made. Something new. Dr Schultz says our intelligence has increased more than one thousand per cent. I suspect he’s underestimated; I think we’re probably as intelligent as he is — maybe more.")  There's an interesting possibility in that line--a group of rats who can not only create a society equal to humans, but create a society that transcends human civilization.  But this is never realized in the narrative.  The actions of the rats never seem to be superior in intelligence to the humans, and sometimes the rats do some very stupid things.  (The death of Jenner and his followers--if indeed that was Jenner and his followers--is ignoble for such supposedly intelligent creatures.  They died because they forgot to check if the motor was still plugged in before they tried to move it.)

So that's the first major flaw.

Arguably the pacing of the book is another flaw, although here opinions will probably differ.
I had previously mentioned the incredible amount of detail in the Rats of NIMH's backstory was a strength, but I should probably qualify this remark.  It's a strength insofar as it helps you to take the premise of the book seriously.  But it's a weakness in terms of narrative momentum.  The long backstory takes up about a third of the book.  And not all of it is necessary.  
Chapters 14, 15, 16 and 17, which describe how the rats were captured, taken to the laboratory, and experimented upon, are actually pretty interesting.  The escape from the laboratory (chapter 18) goes into perhaps a bit more detail about the air shafts then necessary, but is also moderately interesting.  But then once the rats get out of the laboratory, the rest of the backstory--talking about how they stayed at Boniface Estate, and how they discovered a toy truck before eventually settling on the Fitzgibbon's farm--takes up an additional 3 more chapters, and is probably unnecessary.

And then, after all that backstory, the story doesn't reach any sort of climax.  I mean, after all that backstory, and after all that build-up, we really need some sort of dramatic pay-off at the end, and the book doesn't really give us one.

Which brings me to the key difference between the book and the movie.
The movie had a good-old fashioned dramatic climax, with Jenner killing Nicodemus, Jenner fighting Justin, and Mrs. Frisby's house almost sinking into the mud and getting saved at the last minute.  But none of that was in the book.  Arguably both for better and for worse.

The big difference between the movie and the book is the lack of conflict in the book.  There's no dramatic sword fight in the book between Jenner and Justin.  Jenner and his followers leave the colony peacefully--and in the book, Jenner only ever appears in the backstory sections.
Again, I'm somewhat torn as to whether I consider this a positive or a negative.  On the one hand, the movie version of Jenner makes him into a typical cartoon villain.  (Movie Jenner is pure evil just for the sake of being evil--like most villains in children's cartoons.)  In the movie, the conflict between Jenner and Justin, and the sword fight at the end, while it did add a necessary climax to the movie, in some ways also cheapened the story by resorting to a stereotypical villain cliches.

I think it was for this reason that for years I had remembered Jenner as being more complex and developed in the book.  But now that I've re-read the book, I realize that he's actually not that much more developed in the book.  Jenner's ideological position in the book--his objections to the Thorn Valley plan, and his insistence that there's nothing wrong with stealing from humans-- aren't really articulated that much better in the book than they are in the movie.  In other words, there's no great exchange of ideas between Jenner and Nicodemus in the book.  Jenner is simply presented as a reactionary who can't foresee the necessity of the new plan, and he doesn't get much more color than that (*16).  It's not that the Jenner in the book is so great, it's that the Jenner in the movie is so bad.  Because in the book, at least, Jenner doesn't degenerate into a mindless cartoon villain. And that made me remember the book as being deeper than it really was.

But on the other hand, as cliched as he was, evil cartoon Jenner brought a much needed dramatic climax to the movie that is sorely lacking in the book.

I don't know.  I have mixed feelings.

Other Notes

The Dialogue
In my opinion, this book has a case of "all the characters talk the same" syndrome.  The author, Robert C. O'Brien, has a rather loquacious narration style, and it spills over to his characters as well.  Nicodemus, when narrating the backstory, talks in the same style.  Justin, when talking about all the logistics of putting the sleeping powder in Dragon's bowl, uses the same style.  The characters, in other words, are in danger of all sounding like the same person, and not emerging as distinct personalities.

The Ambiguity
Another thing that can be either positive or negative depending on how you look at it: the ambiguity throughout the book.  
In the movie version, the narrator states very explicitly that the mice were sucked down the air shaft to their deaths.  In the book, however, it's not clear what happened to them.  They got blown away, but no one knows anymore than that.  Nicodemus states that maybe they found their way out, or maybe they died in the air shafts.  No one knows.
Jenner's death as well is ambiguous.  It sure sounds like that was Jenner and his group that got electrocuted at the hardware store, but the characters go to great pains to emphasize that they aren't 100% certain.
Likewise with the death of Justin at the end.  It's quite possible it might have been Justin who died, but Mrs. Frisby's family never finds out for sure.
It's an interesting narrative choice, but it's definitely a choice.  It happens in the book too often to be just an oversight.
Interestingly, this ambiguity is overturned in the sequel Racso and the Rats of NIMH, in which it is revealed that both Jenner and Justin are alive and well.  (I don't actually remember this terribly well from my own reading 30 years ago, but I used the plot summary on Wikipedia to brush up.)  But then, Racso and the Rats of NIMH is not written by the author himself, who was dead by this time, but by his daughter.  So I guess this raises the question of whether or not resolving this ambiguity would have been the original author's wish.

National Institute for Mental Health
So, I guess every fan of the book knows that NIMH stands for "National Institute of Mental Health".  But how do we know that?
I have this memory from 5th grade of there being some sort of great reveal moment in the book where the meaning of NIMH was revealed.  But re-reading it with my students, I waited in vain for that line to appear in the book.
Nowhere in the book does it ever reveal what NIMH stands for.  

It's in the movie--in a throwaway line in which the humans are talking to each other.  

But I was surprised to discover that, contrary to my memories, it never shows up in the book anywhere (*17)
Another interesting narrative choice--maybe this goes along with the pattern of ambiguity I mentioned earlier.

Names
So, what's up with the names in this book?
The animals all have common human names: Jonathon, Martin, Jeremy, etc.  Which is probably strange if you think about it for too long, but of course you try not to think about it for too long because it's a children's story with talking animals.
But then, once the rats are introduced, the common names are interspersed with some rather unusual choices.  Nicodemus.  Jenner.  Sullivan.
Really, how does a rat end up with a name like Nicodemus or Sullivan?  It took me out of the story a bit.
And while I'm on the subject... what kind of a strange name is Mrs. Frisby?  Her husband has a first name (Jonathon Frisby).  Why does Mrs. Frisby not have a first name?
And why is the Frisby family the only animals in the book who have a last name...

Wait, I'm overthinking this book again, aren't I?

Jonathan Frisby's Death (and Nicodemus's eye)
It's an interesting little tragic backstory to the Frisby family that Jonathan Frisby died about a year before this story took place.  But, I don't know if the author quite pulls it off.  When it's finally revealed how Jonathan Frisby died, I'm not sure that scene has the emotional punch it needed.  It seems like just another detail in the long backstory.  Mrs. Frisby is briefly upset, and then the story just moves on.
Also, Nicodemus losing his eye seems like another lost opportunity in the backstory.  You think it's going to be some big dramatic reveal, and then he just says in Chapter 19: "It was in one of the dangerous times that I lost my eye and got the scar you can see on my face."  What is the point of that?

My Experience Using this Book in the Classroom
So, as of this writing, I've now used this story in 5 classes since I first started experimenting with it back in May.  In each class, a few students have really liked it, but the overall reception has been decidedly luke-warm.
The first 9 chapters are all about Mrs. Frisby and poor little sick Timothy.  My students seemed to give the story the benefit of the doubt at first, but by chapter 9 they were getting really bored with it. 
(In one of my classes, the teaching assistant told me the students wanted to stop doing the story.  I did a mid-course analysis to check student engagement, and the majority of the students either wanted to keep going or didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other.  But the ones who disliked it really disliked it.)  
Interest picked up when the plot twist about the rats of NIMH was introduced, and for at least a couple chapters afterwards interest was high.  Then Nicodemus goes into his long backstory in chapter 14.  The first couple chapters, the interest was still high, but as the backstory goes on and on, interest begins to die out.  When the backstory finally ends in chapter 23, student interest is very low, and it was very difficult keeping them engaged for the last few chapters.

I may be looking to change to a different book in the near future.

Racso
Now that I've finished re-reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I really wish I had access to the sequel Racso and the Rats of NIMH , because I'm totally in the mood to keep going with this series.  But unfortunately, I can't find a copy online, and finding books here in Asia is always a struggle.  So, for the moment, I will have to leave the series here.

Everyone's Talking About This Book

So, did you ever have it where you started getting into something, and suddenly you start noticing references to it everywhere?  I think there's even a scientific name for it.  (The Baader-Meinhof Noticing Phenomenon, according to Google (*18)).

During the months I was reading this book, several people I knew or follow online were also reading the book or talking it.

In my twitter feed there was a conversation about this book from some of my old childhood friends.  During the same period, my old college friend Phil  tweeted that the "Secret of Nimh" movie still holds up.  I asked him if he had any thoughts on the book.  He said he had never read it.  I recommended it, and our other friend Adam chimed in to say that he had also enjoyed it as kid.  (Phil's since deleted his tweet, but you can still see Adam and my responses).

And thirdly, also during this same period, Fredrik deBoer reviewed this book on his goodreads account.

Currently reading Mrs Frisby to my 4yo. I haven’t read it myself since I was a kid.

— Jon Doane (@jpdoane) May 24, 2020

 

Ha, funny you guys should mention that. Just started using Mrs Frisby in my ESL class here in Vietnam. Using it with high level teenagers, but they're still struggling with the vocabulary. 4 year old sounds very ambitious. Can she understand it?

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) May 24, 2020

He gets (and loves) the overall story but I’m sure there are a bunch of words he doesn’t understand. I will often stop and ask if he knows what a word means and we’ll talk about it (he usually just wants me to stop talking and get back to the book)

— Jon Doane (@jpdoane) May 24, 2020

He loved it. Certainly didn’t understand every word and asked a lot of questions, but he liked it a lot. We watched the movie too, which it turns out kinda sucks (my adult opinion - he liked it)

— Jon Doane (@jpdoane) July 19, 2020

Movies always pale in comparison to the book. The plot really got dumbed down a lot. But the animation in that movie was really great for its time--especially in comparison to what Disney was doing in the same time period.

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) July 20, 2020

Yes, I read somewhere that this was a common criticism of the movie adaptation when it first came out.

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) July 21, 2020

I loved the book as a kid, haven’t read it since. Should check it out

— Adam Fleming Petty (@flamingpetty) August 11, 2020

* "only talked about by others"

Also, during this same period, a co-worker of mine mentioned he had just re-reading this book with his girlfriend.  (He wanted to introduce this story to his Vietnamese Girlfriend).

All the people mentioned above are the same age as me, or a few years younger (i.e. mid-30s to early 40s).  So it seems that I'm not the only person of my generation still interested in this book all these years later.

As you can also see from the above discussion, there's some debate about whether the book or the movie is superior.  My friend Jon prefers the book, Freddie Deboer says the movie is better.
Which brings me to the next section:

The Book Versus the Movie
I actually used this movie in the classroom three years ago as part of my showing movies in the classroom project.
Shortly afterwards, Avclub posted an article: The Secret Of NIMH leaves basically every kid who sees it with a lingering dread and I reacted to that article on my blog.   
I've had a look at my old post, and it still represents the way I feel about the movie now, so rather than write something new here, I'll just quote myself:

The reviewer hits many of the main points about the movie in the article linked above, so I'll just add a couple thoughts of my own:
1) While I was creating PowerPoints for this movie, I used a lot of Screencaps to help break down the story and dialogue for my students (I used the ones available at this site here).
In the process of pouring over all these frames of animation, I noticed something.  The animation on this movie is absolutely stunning.
Not only lots of detail in the frames, but also very interesting perspectives and camera angles.
This was Don Bluth's first animated feature after he broke away from Disney, and it's apparent that he was out to dazzle the world with his first movie.
It's a pity it never did well in theaters, but I suppose it has done well enough on home video to cement Don Bluth's reputation.
2) As the reviewer says (in the article linked to above) the main plot for The Rats of Nimh is relatively straightforward, but all the backstory and side characters make it convoluted.
Too convoluted, says Roger Ebert.  " It is not quite such a success on the emotional level, however, because it has so many characters and involves them in so many different problems that there's nobody for the kids in the audience to strongly identify with."
It never bothered me as a kid, but as an adult, watching this movie with my students last year, I noticed it.  There's too much story crammed in here for any of the characters to have meaningful arcs.  There's a lot of complexity hinted at with with the backstory of the rats of NIMH, but it's never really fleshed out.
The book on which The Secret of Nimh is based, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, is much better.  Or at least, it is if memory serves.  (The last time I read the book was all the way back in 5th grade.  But it made an impression on me, and I can still remember many parts of it clearly.)

To this, I'll add a couple more observations:

1) I read somewhere that the movie was criticized at the time for introducing the element of magic into the story (something that had not been in the book.)  As you can see above, this is the main criticism my friend Jon has of the movie, and I agree with him.  It's not only that the magic adds an unwanted extra element, it's that the magic is never explained and doesn't seem to make sense within the world of the story.
2) Fredrik deBoer, on the other hand, much prefers the movie because the book has no dramatic climax. And I really see where he's coming from.  The book needed more of a climax.  But at the same time, I don't like how Jenner degenerates into a mindless villain in the movie.  Perhaps somewhere out there, there's another adaptation of this story waiting to be made--an adaptation in which we get both more complex motivation from Jenner, and also a big dramatic climax.

Footnotes (docs, pub)
(*1) I don't remember being aware of the 1982 theatrical release.  I was barely 4 years old at the time, and had an early childhood that was sheltered from the mass-media, so I wasn't cogniscient of what was playing in the movie theaters until I started school.

(*2) Yeah, in retrospect, it's ironic that the Disney Channel was showing this movie, giving that this is the movie Don Bluth made specifically to prove himself a challenger to Disney.  But then, given Disney's reputation for acquiring absolutely everything, it's not surprising.

(*3) I grew out of that stage in a few years, and by middle-school I was reading and enjoying the original Peter Pan and The Jungle Books.

(*4) Wow!  Life goes by so fast, huh?

(*5) The scene where the rats were being taught to read, for whatever reason, has remained stuck in my head all these years later.

(*6) Also, as far as I can remember, the reading experience was mostly reading this book together as a class.  We each were given our own copies, but the teacher stood at the front of the room and read the book aloud, and we followed along in our individual copies.

(*7) Actually that's not completely true.  I remember that Racso and the Rats of NIMH took place in the rats' new home in Thorn Valley, and explored how the rats set up their society in the new place.  But that's all I remember from 30 years ago.  I don't remember any of the plot.  I didn't even remember the name until I googled it just now.
Fortunately I can supplement my poor memory by going to the Wikipedia page, and reading about the book there. 
According to Wikipedia, Racso and the Rats of NIMH wasn't even written by the same author, but was written by his daughter.  I don't think I realized that when I originally read the book.

(*8)  The website http://esl-bits.net/ is actually popular among a lot of English teachers I know.  And with good reason.  It's got so many books for free all online.  

...I suspect it's too good to be true.
The website appears to be run by a well-meaning Australian guy, who appears to genuinely believe that his website is covered by fair-use because it's not for profit and intended for educational purposes only.  But my own guess is that this website is running on borrowed time--the only reason it's been allowed to exist is because the copyright holders haven't found it yet.  My prediction is sooner or later, it'll get shut down.  Hopefully later, though, because there's a lot of great stuff on the website.

Each book contains the text and an audio recording to accompany it, so that the learners can read and listen to the book at the same time.
The audio recording seems to be professional quality.  (As someone who's listened to a lot of free audiobooks from librivox, I can tell the difference between amateur quality and professional.)  So I'm relatively sure that it's the official audio book created by the licensed publishers that's been uploaded.
The website says that the text has been "modified", but it certainly hasn't been simplified at all for ESL learners.  The only modifications I could find in the text is where it was changed from American to Australian/British English.  For example, "elevator" is changed to "lift".
The guy running the website is Australian, so I guess this is fair enough as it's his website.  But unfortunately this means that the audio no longer matches the text exactly.  
It's a minor complaint.  The text still matches the audio 99% of the time.  (The instances where the American and Australian English are different are very few.)  But it is still a discrepancy.  I didn't want my students to get confused, so when I used these chapters with my classes, I copied them on to a Google doc, and then listened to the audio as I read it, and corrected any words that were different.  Then, in the reading class, I played the audio for the students and they could follow along with the printed version.  For the listening class, I downloaded the audio from the website, and sent the audio file to my students without the text.

(*9) This policy was more in my head than explicitly mentioned on this blog.  I think the only times I mentioned this policy was when I was making an exception to the policy--my reviews of The Three Musketeers, and Tom Sawyer.  

(*10) Writing reviews of books takes me a fair amount of time, and I was initially concerned that if I reviewed everything I read, I would never get a break from this book review project.  

But upon reflection, I've decided that I'm such a slow reader that this is not really much of a concern.  I only read 6 books last year.  If I didn't include the books I re-read, I would hardly have any books on my reading list at all.

That, plus I'm a much older man now than I was when I started blogging in 2003.  Back in 2003 the books I read in my schooldays were still fairly fresh in my memory.  But I'm old enough now that my school days are pretty faded, so if I re-read one of those books now, it's almost like reading a new book. 

(*11) Of course for my generation, who read this book after the 1982 movie had already come out, there were no surprises. It's a classic case of the popularity of the movie ruining the suspense of the book.

But it was fun using this book in Vietnam with a group of students who were completely unfamiliar with the story.  They had no idea where the story was going, and I enjoyed seeing their surprise when we finally got to the underground rat society.

It's also unfortunate that the title of the book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, acts as a spoiler by having the word Rats right in the title.  In the book, the first 7 chapters keep the mystery of the rats carefully hidden, so it's a shame that the title gives away the fact that the rats will be a prominent part of the story. I strongly suspect (although I can't find this verified anywhere) that this was a case of the publishers choosing the title and not the author.  At any rate, the title of the movie adaptation--The Secret of Nimh--is a much better choice.  

In my class, I copied the text of the book from this website: http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/Rats/contenu.html --and printed it out as paper handouts.  In that way, I was able to keep the title hidden from the students.

(*12) If we were inclined to over-analyze everything, there's also the problem of articulation.  How are the mice, the rats, and the crow, etc, supposed to produce the necessary sounds necessary to make English sentences?  But I think we have to give this a pass and just accept it as a given that in the genre of talking animal stories, we don't ask how the animals can articulate human speech sounds.  

I suppose it's not clear that the animals are talking in English.  I mean, we the readers are reading the conversations as if it were in English, but maybe this is just supposed to be a translation from some sort of animal language?

But then, that would make it all the more strange that the animals can understand the human conversations perfectly.  Especially the wild animals who don't live with the humans--where did they get the necessary exposure to understand human language?

(*13)  In the movie the cat is definitely portrayed as just a brute beast.  We don't see as much of the cat in the book (he's referenced frequently, but the actual confrontations are less).  But the impression I got from brief glimpses we do get of the cat is that he was just a dumb brute beast in the world of the book as well.

(*14) And in chapter 22 Thorn Valley, Nicodemus talks about making fish hooks and fish nets, presumably so the rats could catch and eat fish, so I'm guessing fish aren't included among the intelligent animals either?

(*15)  In my classes, I tried to hint to the students that there was something unusual about Mr Ages in order to try to get them to notice some of the clues to the mystery that the author was leaving.  How did a simple ordinary mouse know so much about plants and their medicinal qualities?  But my students didn't think it was at all curious.  In this world where mice already live in houses and speak English, why couldn't a mouse know about medicine?

(*16) Also in the book, Jenner is Nicodemus's best friend from childhood, which potentially has the potential to give his relationship with Nicodemus more depth.  Except the book never really does anything interesting with it.  
Nicodemus, when recalling Jenner, always talks with some fondness and sentimentality about him (another dynamic which was, of course, entirely absent from the film) but that's about it.

(*17) Unless, of course, there's something wrong with the online copy I was using.  But I think it's a complete copy--see footnote 8.

(*18) Wait, what? Baader-Meinhof effect?  As in the German New Left Militant group founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof?
Yes, apparently so. According to Wikipedia:

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon was originally noticed by a Terry Mullen, who in 1994 wrote a letter to a newspaper column in which he mentioned that he had first heard of the Baader–Meinhof Group, and shortly thereafter coincidentally came across the term from another source.

Video Review (Playlist HERE)
I rambled on for too long, so the video review is in 2 parts.  The first part ends abruptly.  (My camera automatically shuts off after 30 minutes.)

Part 1

Part 2

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #53

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien: Book Review (Complete)