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The Amazing Maurice and His Educated RodentsTerry Pratchett
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
by Terry Pratchett
A talking cat runs a Pied Piper swindle with a troupe of talking rats, until they reach a town where something worse is already living under the streets.
A story about animals and children, funny and thoughtful in tone. We would put it with children of 10–13, and at a reading age of about 11 for reading alone.
Worth knowing before you buy
- Mild peril
- An animal dies
None of this makes it a bad book — often the opposite. It is here so you can decide whether it is right for your child now or in a year or two.
Our take on this book
Maurice is a talking cat running a very good scam: he supplies the rats for a fake plague, and his troupe of talking rats supplies the piper, and the two of them split the towns' pay-off. Then they reach Bad Blintz, where the con goes wrong because something genuinely evil is already living under the streets. Terry Pratchett's only Discworld book written for children won the Carnegie Medal, and it is both extremely funny and unexpectedly deep: the rats have started asking what is right and wrong, and the book takes their moral awakening seriously even while cracking jokes. There is real menace in the cellars, some peril, and the deaths of animals, so it has more bite than its comic setup suggests. For a bright reader of ten to thirteen it is a rich, clever, humane novel that treats them as capable of handling ideas, which is exactly why they tend to love it.
If they like this, try these
Chosen by matching age, reading age, tone and subject — not by what is selling.
WildsparkVashti Hardy
Flour BabiesAnne Fine
Howl's Moving CastleDiana Wynne Jones
Skulduggery PleasantDerek Landy
The GiverLois Lowry
The Graveyard BookNeil Gaiman
Or let them write their own.
Nothing gets a child reading like a story they invented themselves. Your child plans the characters and the plot, and we write, illustrate and print it as a real book with their name on the cover as the author.
Find another book
Tell us the age, the reading age and what they like, and we will suggest a handful.