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A review by gorgonine
Mossflower by Brian Jacques
4.0
Plot: Various cute woodland animals team up to defeat less cute (subjectively) woodland animals. There is water-based siege warfare.
1. There was a point in my life where I devoured every Redwall book I could get my hands on and I ended up reading at least three quarters of the series before things started to feel repetitive. Mossflower was favorite of the books I did read, so I really wanted to see how it withstood the test a decade and a half of acquired cynicism.
2. And the answer turns out to be “not too badly, actually”- I made allowances for the book being aimed at younger readers when rating it, but even without that it was a zippy story with many interlocking plot elements which managed to keep me invested. We have simultaneous subplots of Martin & Co’s quest to the big fire mountain and the La resistance activities in Mossflower, and they play off each other pretty well. The exploration suplot gives us new animal species and cultures and a prophetic volcano. The resistance subplot is basically guerilla warfare and BOY do I love my guerilla warfare plots. (As with everything, I blame Animorphs.)
3. It’s nowhere near perfect: The morality is far from nuanced (as it typical for a Redwall book) and the good guys and bad guys have big neon signs over their heads proclaiming them as such. The characters are so incredibly homogenous that most of them bleed into each other with little trouble. Sometimes the “cute” bits are saccharine enough to tip over into cheesy. Tsarmina was basically worfed a la Azula in the last quarter of the book, and with even less rationale for it than Azula had. The intellect of the bad guys is far too “oh they are not intelligent per se but they ARE cunning” for my tastes, which I thought was unfair because when was a smart antagonist a bad thing?
4. I can appreciate that all of these things are standard fare for middle grade books, but I’ve read way too many middle grade books which go “give me nuanced morality or give me death” to really let this one off without comment. Mossflower very much does not shy away from topics like loss or grief, which makes the strict good/evil dichotomy that much more disappointing.
5. There were some very good characters and plot elements: I got attached to the bats (for SOME unknown reason because they were weird). The Mask and Chibb are my favorite characters (look, all of you whitebread jerks can make as much fun of Chibb as you want but he was very much the MVP in your little resistance crew okay and also HE doesn’t have opposable thumbs how is he supposed to cook stuff). Gingivere was a sweetheart who leveraged his limited power into maximum utility. The siege warfare was great, even though there was less of it than I hoped and it tied far too much into Tsarmina’s sanity slippage. I also really, really loved how the whole thing between Tsarmina and the mercenary crew captain played out- definitely the best part of the book, that. Too bad Tsarmina immediately turned into a gibbering mess afterwards.
6. There were a lot of things which struck me as pointless or overblown, but that’s mostly down to my lack of interest in all things action-oriented. 90% of fight scenes make my eyes glaze over (unless they involve things like siege warfare), so the climactic cat vs. mouse battle? Really didn’t do a thing for me. (Boar’s bits were pretty cool though, ngl.)
7. So anyway: better than I expected, worse than I hoped.
1. There was a point in my life where I devoured every Redwall book I could get my hands on and I ended up reading at least three quarters of the series before things started to feel repetitive. Mossflower was favorite of the books I did read, so I really wanted to see how it withstood the test a decade and a half of acquired cynicism.
2. And the answer turns out to be “not too badly, actually”- I made allowances for the book being aimed at younger readers when rating it, but even without that it was a zippy story with many interlocking plot elements which managed to keep me invested. We have simultaneous subplots of Martin & Co’s quest to the big fire mountain and the La resistance activities in Mossflower, and they play off each other pretty well. The exploration suplot gives us new animal species and cultures and a prophetic volcano. The resistance subplot is basically guerilla warfare and BOY do I love my guerilla warfare plots. (As with everything, I blame Animorphs.)
3. It’s nowhere near perfect: The morality is far from nuanced (as it typical for a Redwall book) and the good guys and bad guys have big neon signs over their heads proclaiming them as such. The characters are so incredibly homogenous that most of them bleed into each other with little trouble. Sometimes the “cute” bits are saccharine enough to tip over into cheesy. Tsarmina was basically worfed a la Azula in the last quarter of the book, and with even less rationale for it than Azula had. The intellect of the bad guys is far too “oh they are not intelligent per se but they ARE cunning” for my tastes, which I thought was unfair because when was a smart antagonist a bad thing?
4. I can appreciate that all of these things are standard fare for middle grade books, but I’ve read way too many middle grade books which go “give me nuanced morality or give me death” to really let this one off without comment. Mossflower very much does not shy away from topics like loss or grief, which makes the strict good/evil dichotomy that much more disappointing.
5. There were some very good characters and plot elements: I got attached to the bats (for SOME unknown reason because they were weird). The Mask and Chibb are my favorite characters (look, all of you whitebread jerks can make as much fun of Chibb as you want but he was very much the MVP in your little resistance crew okay and also HE doesn’t have opposable thumbs how is he supposed to cook stuff). Gingivere was a sweetheart who leveraged his limited power into maximum utility. The siege warfare was great, even though there was less of it than I hoped and it tied far too much into Tsarmina’s sanity slippage. I also really, really loved how the whole thing between Tsarmina and the mercenary crew captain played out- definitely the best part of the book, that. Too bad Tsarmina immediately turned into a gibbering mess afterwards.
6. There were a lot of things which struck me as pointless or overblown, but that’s mostly down to my lack of interest in all things action-oriented. 90% of fight scenes make my eyes glaze over (unless they involve things like siege warfare), so the climactic cat vs. mouse battle? Really didn’t do a thing for me. (Boar’s bits were pretty cool though, ngl.)
7. So anyway: better than I expected, worse than I hoped.