Rat Rule 79: An Adventure

Have you heard the riddle: What is the difference between a duck? The answer: One of its legs is both the same. Whether it's old hat or newly minted, if you find it funny, then this book is for you. Fred is a girl who is angry at the world and especially at her mother whose job as a mathematics professor has taken the two of them to five different towns in Fred's almost-thirteen years (her birthday is the next day). She is sick of boxes, and packing, and paper plates and take-out (though she still likes lo mein noodles), and she is particularly tired of being told that Sleep is the Answer to all problems that are not solved by Knowing That You Are Loved So Much. So she stomps off to her almost empty room, with its mattress on the floor and not much else, "very wide awake and very angry" and waits for her mother to come and apologize for something. But she doesn't. Eventually Fred peeks out and sees her mother standing at attention in front of a large white paper lantern, strangely dressed in a skirt like a picnic tablecloth. Then her mother steps into the lantern and vanishes. Of course, Fred goes after her.

And this is where the story goes pear-shaped. Fred finds herself in a dungeon in a kingdom where the supreme ruler – Queen Rat – has decreed that almost everything is illegal, including time and, especially, birthdays. ("At least it doesn't say, 'No peanut butter' ", said Fred. "Oh, that's on there, too. Right after 'No being unkind to camels' ".) The final prohibition is "And absolutely No Birthday Parties", which, given Fred's present state of mind, she thinks is a Good Idea. Helped on her search for her mother by the almost-invisible elephant in the room (name of Downer), who was in the dungeon when she arrived, a mongoose, who freed them both, and several other improbable beings (I particularly liked the Know-It-Owl), Fred manages to find Queen Rat's errant run-away child (a deer), whose maturing was the cause of Rat's original prohibition of the aging process (because Children are the Best Thing in the World) and time is, sort of, restored, or at least its passage is acknowledged. At this point Fred is reunited with her mother on the heels of another joke: Knock, knock. Who's there? Fred. Fred Who? I'm a-Fred. I think Fred has just faced up to her own personal Elephant in the Room, though she has left Downer behind in the Land of Impossibility.

Everything is a bit Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass-like in this book. Animals get bigger as they move father away until they vanish entirely. Downer has a list of things he is going to do when he gets a Round Tuit (pictured as a disk with "Tuit" inscribed on it). There is a chapter – the chapters are all very short, but this one is a one-paragraph half-page – on Zeno's paradox and another on the square root of minus one. (Fred's mother was a math prof, after all.) The topo-illogical map appears to be drawn on a Klein bottle – reasonable enough for a Land of Impossibility! – and is surrounded by Clouds of Confusion and Uncertainty. The mathematical allusions are good fun if you recognize them, but it is not necessary that you do so to appreciate this book. Almost everyone has had periods in life when nothing makes sense, everything is apparently upside-down and backwards, and it's all too scary for words. Fred just puts it all into context. And there are the constants that don't change: everyone she meets comments on her bunny slippers and her planet pyjamas, and, while she never does achieve her favourite peanut-butter-and-pickle-on-white-bread sandwich (peanut butter was one of Rule 79's prohibitions after all), the mongoose's pickle jar is never empty, and so absolute hunger is kept at bay. It is comforting to know that things could always be worse. I guess.

Anyway, I really liked Rat Rule 79! It's not for the literal-minded, but it's good, it's mind-stretching, and I think readers will come back to it again and find more and more in it to appreciate and enjoy.