Reviews for Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat

The average rating for Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-24 00:00:00 Tariq Adl Bey I first picked this book up when I was browsing at the library because I loved the cover design. I loved the simplicity of Jonathan Bean's illustration and the combination of sweet Emmy and the ill-humored rat in the tree above her. The thoughtfulness of design continues inside with illustrations that together make a flip book along the outer edges of the pages. This book had me hooked visually right from the start. Story-wise? I really loved Emily and the Incredible Shrinking Rat. It was sweet and funny and cheeky and had a wonderful plot. I also found it to be refreshingly innocent - it didn't have a lot of the flash that many books for young kids today seem to have (due of course, to their non-existent attention spans*). My daughter is about to turn five, and I think that she's only very slightly too young for this but I'll definitely be reading it to her in about a year. I wouldn't be surprised if this became one of her favorite books. It's already one of mine. *I hate it when books make this assumption about kids... that everything has to be bright and shiny and super-fast paced in order to keep their attention. EATISR was anything but those things, and was still completely engaging. Did I mention that I loved it? Because I did.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-09-12 00:00:00 Chris Reder Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, by Lynne Jonell, is extremely well-written, with bathroom humor, pathos, and believable and sympathetic characters of both the human and rodent kind. Emmy is a very rich, very lonely little girl. Her parents are constantly going off on long trips and leaving her with a horrible nanny, Miss Barmy. Worse, she recently changed schools and no one in her class acts like she exists. When Emmy starts hearing the class pet rat talking to her, a whole exciting and fantastical series of events unfold. The rat has special powers; in fact, he is one of many rodents with special powers, most of them living in a shop in town where the evil Professor Vole does experiments with them. Soon Emmy begins to learn the powers of the other rodents and she realizes that Miss Barmy is using the rodents to control her, her parents, and even her classmates! Miss Barmy is after Emmy's family's fortune and she will stop at nothing to get it. Emmy, the rat, and Emmy's new friend Joe join forces to stop Miss Barmy's evil plan. Using the resourcefulness of the other rodents, some ingenious catapults, and a lot of sneaking around, they wage war against Miss Barmy with hilarious and satisfying results. This book has everything a good children's novel should: abandoned children, talking animals, a truly evil villian, and a little bit of magic. Hooray! I mustn't forget to mention the terrific illustrations by Jonathan Bean on each page of the novel. As the reader creeps through the story, a rat creeps across a tree branch and then falls, very slowly, into outstretched hands. It is a flipbook and a beautifully done one, too.