It was my birthday, not so long ago, and I received a fairly random graphic novel about some mice, right? Just lately I’ve read it, and it was pretty okay. Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 chronicles the doings of several members of the Mouse Guard over the course of the Fall of 1152. (I’m more proud of that than you might imagine.)

But seriously, there’s a hidden society of mice, and for the purposes of transportation and trade, the Mouse Guard keeps the roads safe of enemies: weasels and cats and so forth. The map indicates that they’ve found a way to turn back large predators from their terriroty via a scent barrier; it’s clear that the world has more depth than was presented in this original book. However, all is not well in mousey-town, as someone has snuck out a map of the home city of the Guard for the purposes of villainous treachery.

The art has a very A.A. Milne or Peter Cottontail feel to it, just slightly cartoonish versions of real animals[1], but since everything is at mouse-scale, the occasional marauding snake or crab is quite exciting. The story’s pacing and spare prose adds to my impression that it was meant to be a kid-book. And believe me, it’s a pretty good one that a new reader would get a lot of enjoyment out of. I got probably 50 pages of enjoyment out of the 192 page book, myself. The story was fine, it was just widely paced, like I said. But the art made up for most of that. I just didn’t expect to finish quite that large of a book in a single day around my unreasonably crowded work schedule.

[1] To the extent that mice wear cloaks and carry swords. Which I assume is a very wide extent indeed.