Mariel of Redwall

A tough resourceful mousemaid survives enslavement and being tossed out on a stormy see, but loses her memory. She finds her way to Redwall where she meets Martin the Warrior in her dreams and regains her memories. She sets out to find her father and solves riddles, makes friends and eats lots of

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really yummy sounding food.

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Another great book in the series!

I decided to stop reading the series after this one.

This was the fourth Redwall novel published, and I feel it marks a turning point in Brian Jacques' storytelling style. Certain stylistic elements have been tightened up, some things have been dropped, and you can tell he has a firmer grasp on the shape of his world as a whole. It's a lot of fun to

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watch the building of the Abbey and see how different things weave together across the books to create a full tapestry of story.

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Mariel of Redwall by Brian Jacques is the fourth book in the Redwall series.

All I can say is this series is so much fun to read. I highly recommend it.

Fourth in publication order, this one lands someplace in time between the legend of Martin and well before Matthias, describing the story of how Redwall Abbey acquired its bell. At this point I'm starting to feel the repetitiveness, and I'm of two minds about it. Again there's long debates over

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food preparation, young scamps teasing their elders, the nasty braggart villain and his traitorous seconds-in-command, domineering badgers, the lippy hares, etc. It's a little wearing from that perspective, but the winning formula will not be denied. There's plenty of amusing speech in this one, my favourites being the pirate-like searats, the hares of Salamandastron and Durry Quill, making it a fun read-aloud. Every volume has featured infighting among the villains but Greypatch deserves a special honor for being smarter than the average usurper, and he puts up a good struggle against the odds. Martin appears to the Redwallers as a kind of ghostly dream advisor, which made me wonder why he wasn't more of a presence like this for Mattheus down the line.

Once again we're treated to a line-by-line prophecy in poetry that provides both direction to our heroes and a series of riddles, which makes me wonder if we'll ever meet in a future volume one of the characters who composes all this nonsense. Some of the internal consistency of the series is eternally satisfying: Salamandastron and the Abbey continue to earn their prestige as bulwarks against villainy, the hares maintain their solid reliability, etc. While in some ways it feels a lot like the same cast of characters every time under different names, the pleasing familiarity can be relied upon and there's still something fresh in each iteration. Four books in and this is my favourite so far, I think.

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