A widowed field mouse has to move her family before the farmer's plow comes through, except one of her children is too sick with pneumonia to survive being moved. Out of options, she goes to the rats who live under the rosebush, and discovers they are not ordinary rats. They escaped a laboratory that made them able to read.
Newbery Medal, 1972.
Why it earns read-aloud time
Because it has a plot, a real one, with a clock on it.
Most books written for this age are episodes. Something happens, then something else happens. This one is a thriller. There is a deadline, a sick child, a plan that can fail, and a genuine cost. Chapters end in the middle of trouble. You will get asked for one more.
And underneath the suspense is the best question on this whole list. The rats can read, so they have been living off stolen electricity and stolen grain from the farm, and they have decided that is beneath them. They are building a place where they grow their own food and take nothing. Nobody is making them. They just decided.
A child can chew on that for a long time.
The child it lands with
The one who says books are boring, which nine times out of ten means nothing was ever at stake in the books they were handed.
Also the kid who likes how things work. There is a real mechanical satisfaction in the rats' engineering, the plan, the wiring, the moving of the cinder block.
One place to stop and talk
When Nicodemus explains why the rats are leaving to start over instead of staying comfortable, stop.
Ask your child why it bothers the rats to take things they could easily keep taking. Nobody is watching them. Nobody would punish them. That is the whole question, and an eight-year-old will get somewhere real with it.
What to know going in
This is the second most intense book on the list, after Holes.
Mrs. Frisby is a widow. Her husband Jonathan is dead before page one, and how he died matters to the plot. The laboratory chapters are genuinely upsetting: animals in cages, injections, animals that do not survive the experiments. It is not gratuitous and it is not dwelt on, but it is there and it is the emotional center of the book.
Rats die at the end. The ending is also slightly open, which some children find unsatisfying and others find perfect.
If you have a child who worries at night, read the NIMH chapters in daylight rather than at bedtime. That one adjustment solves most of it.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
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