Rat in my Kitchen

[jekylljuice]

Originally Posted by Pawbah

I had heard that justin doesn't die in the next novel, but I also saw that it was written by someone else. So was Justin still being alive what the original author intended?

Those were my thoughts too. Since the two succeeding novels, written by his daughter Jane Leslie Conly, were published long after his death, we'll never know for sure what O'Brien himself would have made of them. Despite a couple of contradictions with the original story, I seem to remember the first sequel, Racso and the Rats of NIMH, being a pretty good read, but the second RT, Margaret and the Rats of NIMH, which involved the rats having to make communications with the human world, was somewhat weaker, and seemed to take things to an extreme even for an anthropomorphic fantasy. It was a pretty central plot point that the Rats of NIMH were able to read and write, but, unless I missed something, I don't remember it ever being established in O'Brien's novel that they could actually speak to humans in plain English.