RAT RULE 79

The day before Fred’s 13th birthday, she enters a magical world on an adventure that pays homage to classic children’s fantasy.

Fred and her mother have moved four times in six years, and Fred is frankly sick and tired of it. Angry at her mom though she may be, however, when Fred sees her mother step into an enormous paper lantern and vanish, she still plunges to the rescue. So it is that this young white girl finds herself locked in a dungeon with an elephant called Downer, in a land where much is illegal under “THE ESSENTIAL AND VERY GOOD AND NO ONE CAN DISAGREE WITH RAT RULE 79”: no keeping time, no getting older or wiser, and absolutely no birthday parties. Also no peanut butter. Downer wants to rescue the Rat Queen, Fred wants to rescue her mother, and a mongoose named Gogo needs to earn money to take care of her 17 children. The Land of Impossibility (depicted incompletely on a “topo-illogical” map) is a metaphor-heavy dreamscape evocative of The Phantom Tollbooth, while its magical animals speak with a combination of pedantry and nonsense paralleling that found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Two-color illustrations similarly evoke historical styles. Snarky cleverness and famous paradoxes charm, but they are weakened by too-quick resolutions to both major and minor plot threads. Troublingly, a character’s depression is treated as a matter of personal choice.

High nonsense that almost lives up to its potential—but not quite