Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
by Robert C. O'Brien
Summary
Mrs Frisby, a widowed field mouse raising four children alone in a cinder block near a farmer's field, faces a crisis on two fronts: her son Timothy is too sick with pneumonia to be moved, and the farmer is about to begin spring plowing that will destroy their home regardless. Seeking help, she is directed to a colony of rats living secretly in a nearby rosebush, rats who turn out to possess remarkable intelligence, literacy, and even electricity, the result of experiments conducted on them years earlier at the National Institute of Mental Health, where Mrs Frisby's own late husband Jonathan had also been held and altered before escaping alongside them. The rats' leader, Nicodemus, explains their history and agrees to help move Mrs Frisby's home to safety, a plan that requires drugging the farmer's dangerous cat Dragon, a task Mrs Frisby herself volunteers for even after learning Dragon was responsible for her husband's death. She is briefly captured by the farmer's son and overhears a plan to exterminate the rats, information that lets Justin, one of the rats, free her in time to warn the colony. In the climax, poison gas floods the rats' tunnels as they scramble to evacuate before the exterminators arrive; most escape, though two do not survive. Mrs Frisby's home is safely relocated using the rats' pulleys and engineering, Timothy recovers, and the family resettles for the season, the rats themselves scattering to build a new, hidden colony elsewhere, their future left open rather than resolved.
Reading it blends a modest, domestic animal story with real science fiction ideas about intelligence and ethics, and O'Brien never lets the rats' abilities turn cute; their debate over whether to keep living by stealing from humans, now that they no longer have to, gives the book a moral seriousness unusual for a story about mice and rats. It reads at a steady, absorbing pace suited to being read aloud a chapter at a time.
Historical Context & Significance
Atheneum published Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH in 1971, and the American Library Association gave Robert C. O'Brien the 1972 Newbery Medal over five honor books, Allan W. Eckert's Incident at Hawk's Hill, Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, Miska Miles's Annie and the Old One, and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Headless Cupid. It was also a runner up for the National Book Award that year.
Critics praised its unusual combination of animal fantasy and hard edged science fiction; the children's literature scholar John Rowe Townsend called it pleasing though mildly frustrating, wishing it had pushed its ideas further. O'Brien died in 1973, before seeing the book's full afterlife: Don Bluth's 1982 animated film The Secret of NIMH, made after Bluth left Disney, adapted it loosely, renaming the family Brisby to avoid a trademark conflict and adding magic the novel never uses, and O'Brien's daughter, Jane Leslie Conly, later wrote two continuations of her own, Racso and the Rats of NIMH and R T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH.