This science fiction/fantasy children's book from 1971 (which won the Newbery Medal) is very unusual and very good. It's an animal tale for kids, yes, but one which covers a lot more ground than most. The author was actually inspired by animal experiments at NIMH (the National Institute of Mental Health) on rat and mouse population dynamics--from this he spun a tale of lab animals with artificially-enhanced intelligence, who managed to learn to read, escape, and set up their own society. You don't often see a children's book which touches on evolutionary psychology or sociology, but this story does just that, as the rats think seriously about their origin, morality, ethics, and how best to plan a future society. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH also covers some interspecies ethics--not just the clashes between rats and humans, but the fraught interaction between an owl and a mouse as well.

I rather wonder if Robert C. O'Brien was a fan of the poet Robert Burns. In "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785," Burns takes seriously the distress of the now-homeless creature, and finds commonality in his famous line, "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley." (That's "go oft awry," in English.) He concludes that the mouse has an easier time of it, living in the moment, and not, like the poet, looking back at the past and fearful of the future. O'Brien's story, however, gives the mice agency and forethought, and considers the problem of the mouse family with a child too ill to move before the farmer's plow destroys their house.

There's adventure here as the widowed mouse of the title, Mrs. Frisby, goes in search of assistance, encountering danger in the form of humans and a cat, and learns about the past of her late husband and the rat colony. But there's also a lot of food for thought about how we treat, to quote Burns again, our "poor earth-born companion(s),/ An' fellow-mortal(s)!"

NOVEL: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

AUTHOR: Robert C. O'Brien

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1971

IMAGE: book cover, Atheneum Books for Young Readers