I don't know what I expected of this book, but I wasn't really expecting to enjoy it. You see, I hate rats. Hate them. They've done nothing to me, poor things, apart from being in the most horrifying passage of Nineteen Eighty-Four ever and given my child-self a subsequent loathing for life which is quite unreasonable I know, but still. Those horrible tails. I can't with them.

But this is a fantasy book about rats, and they're not rats really. A stint in an animal testing lab has turned them into people. Oh, they're still rat shaped, but they're literate now, and conversational, and capable of using electricity to light their burrows, and having moral conundrums on the best way to live their best life so, you know, people. And they're all very very kind to a poor widowed mouse who is trying to save her small son from pneumonia and ploughing (which now that I type it, sounds a whole lot more sinister than it is). And that makes them enjoyable. Compelling even, and I enjoy books where characters are both kind and compelling.

Edit: bloody hell, I have just realised. The author who wrote this is the same author who wrote that awful misanthropic piece of shit Z for Zachariah, and I don't know what terrible thing happened to him to sour his faith in people but clearly something did, because that book and every person in it was just hateful.