The smart rats, for example, are dealing with self-consciousness for the first time and want to build up a rat society. Pratchett being Pratchett, he can’t help lifting the story up from a straightforward tale to deeper, funnier explorations of The Things We Know. And the boy Keith is dismissed by everyone because he looks stupid, but secretly he is quite smart. When they learned how to read, they gave themselves names that they thought sounded good, like Dangerous Beans. Maurice the cat is flippant and sarcastic and in typical cat fashion only thinks about himself. The characters and their strange compact make it worth it. It’s a straightforward story broken up in episodes. While most Discworld novels feature multiple storylines all happening at once and converging here and there, this one is simpler in setup. It is slightly shorter, though, and in contrast to his usual stories, it has numbered chapters. If you like Pratchett, this book is no less funny and intelligent.
So, I would definitely recommend this one, even if your first inclination is to skip the YA-marketed books.
Pratchett’s usual wit and attractive writing style is still there, although it is not that focused on wordplay. The greatest difference between this book and the previous ones is that The Amazing Maurice… features talking animals. It’s marketed as his first Young Adult book, which is slightly ridiculous because most Pratchett fans start reading his “normal” Discworld novels in their teenage years. He enlists the rats and a dumb boy to play the pipes, and off they go to earn money through creating and solving rat infestations.Īfter 27 regular Discworld novels about witches, guards and grim reapers, Pratchett felt like walking down a different path and wrote The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. The bossy cat cooks up a scam to make money, similar to the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The cat Maurice and a rat pack have been infected by magic from the rubbish heap next to the Wizards university, and now they are intelligent and can talk.
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