The leader of the rats Hamnpork hates Maurice but has no choice but to back down and let the let Maurice the cat take over. All the rats in that gang got there intelligence from eating garbage and thrown away things behind a Unseen University, accept for Maurice who gained his intelligence from eating one the the educated rats, and that when he made an oath never to eat a talking rat. Then share the money the impostor rat piper gets paid. Maurice is a smart cat that leads his so called 'Educated Rats', while they go from town to town acting like plagues so that there colleague, a kid named Kieth that claims to be the rat piper takes them away. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

I give it 3.5 stars (and intend to get back to more Discworld novels soon!) The ending brought it all together well, I just felt this Discworld novel was a bit patchy. By far Malicia (love the name!) was my favourite human, but Maurice (a cat) didn't play the central role I was expecting him to, and parts of the plot seemed much darker than your average Pratchett, though the humor was spot-on (poisoning the ratcatchers). I had no problems with the rat characters.

Why are the local rat-catchers parading shoelaces as rat tails? They do a bit of schtick from town to town until they come across a town where things don't look as they should. Maurice is part of their entourage, as is Keith (aka 'the stupid looking kid') Some rats foraging through garbage at the back of Unseen University gain self-awareness and intelligence and set off to explore the world en route to finding an island where they can all live in peace and happiness. It heavily hinted, especially in the beginning, that it was going to be a riff on the Pied Piper fairytale, then it took off on a tangent. It's been a while since I indulged in a Terry Pratchett novel (and it was just the Amazing Maurice novel I read, not the stage play.)įrom the blurb, I thought I had a clue of how the story would go, only it didn't.

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