Redwall by Brian Jacques

Redwall by Brian Jacques is the ninth book out of twelve in a series called The Tales of Redwall. The series is based on a medieval time period but is based on a world in which there are no humans only animals particularly small animals such as mice, rats, beavers, badgers, foxes, rabbits and birds. In this book we follow a small mouse called Matthias who takes us on a quest to protect the creatures of the Abbey from the Scourge and their rat leader Cluny.

The story plot in this book follows the conventional shape in which their a range of minor actions and conflicts and then a major conflict/climax and resolution at the end of the story. In comparison to a book like Harry Potter and the Philosiphers Stone this book takes a lot longer between actions and conflicts and does not have a set focus for each chapter. This seems to drag out the story a lot more but is probably due to the author jumping from character to character throughout the course of the book to follow mini stories and quests.

The book is told in a third person narration which also includes comments from the author about how particular animals behave or speak. The author also includes many languages which are particular to certain animals and spells their speech in the ways in which it sounds when they speak it. For example a mole called Foremole says "Yurr moles, get outten loight. Let'n um dog at bone thurr". The books contain a lot of speech from the characters which allows the reader to understand how different animals interact with each other and the ways in which their personalities are reflected through their speech such as the main baddy called Clung says "Clown! Bungling buffoon! Get out of the way! Shift your fat little carcass and let Scragg take over."

These books would be likely suited to year 6/7 students as they are quite long and contain a lot of mini stories which need to be followed to understand the main story line. They do however contain a lot of good character speech which could be analysed in terms of how a character is represented through their speech.