Amazing+Maurice

=__The Amazing Maurice__= Report by Margarita Mouschovias __A Cat and His Rats__ //**The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents**// Terry Pratchett 340. HarperCollins. $6.99    // The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents //  is a story about stories. During the course of this book, we hear the tale of Maurice, a talking cat who travels with a group of talking rats and a “stupid-looking kid.” This unusual group travels from town to town, following Maurice's scheme of sending the rats into the towns to “widdle” in the cream and scurry around the houses. Within a few days, the towns send for a rat piper – which is where the stupid-looking kid comes into the scheme. He, with Maurice, comes into each town as a piper, and plays a small pipe and all the rats follow him out of the town, where the rats then wait as the kid is payed the fee, which is then split between Maurice, the kid, and the rats. This plan works well for the group, and they decide to make the town of Bad Blintz their final town. This is where the reader meets Malicia, who believes that real life is just made up of different stories, and who helps them uncover a larger conspiracy occurring in the town. As the characters delve more into the conspiracy, a pressing issue is raised – as Maurice says it, “in fairy tales, when someone dies. . .it's just a word.” Terry Pratchett is a master of making the reader relate to or sympathize with kinds of characters you would never have related to otherwise. In this particular book, the characters are so complex but realistic that it is easy to feel close to them, such as one of the rats, Hamnpork, who is the leader but feels threatened by the younger rats due to his growing age. In many fiction books, there's a damsel in distress who is unable to help herself, but Pratchett does more than avoid that type of character in his books – he sends it packing, with no tears shed at the farewell. Instead, more realistic characters are brought forth, whose reactions can be surprisingly similar to the reader's, for example Malicia, who although unrealistic in her attempts to arrange the world into stories (often centered around herself), she is initially afraid of the rats, but once she hears them speak, unlike many “damsels” who would start “freaking out” at this point, she instead pesters the group with questions. Characters such as Malicia help make the plot even more enjoyable. In many of today's books, plot backgrounds are summarized quickly either in the beginning of the book in the form of a note before the first chapter, or by a character near the start of the book. In this book, however, the reader pieces together information as the characters do. Although some insight into the characters' thoughts is helpful to understanding events, the reader could not predict the ending of this book early on – Pratchett avoids clich   é    s that could foreshadow too much of the plot, keeping you guessing until the very last page. I would recommend this book to most people: Age is not a large issue – as long as the length of the book and size of the print is not intimidating and the reader likes realistic fairy tails, this book could be for them. I give this book two thumbs up, from the first sentence to it's tap-dancing rats!