EULALIAAAAA!

Last Saturday, the literary world lost an icon.  Brian Jacques, the author of the critically acclaimed Redwall series of children's books, passed away from a heart attack at the age of 71.  This news was especially saddening to me, because when I was in middle school, the Redwall books were pretty much all I ever read outside of the required reading for my English classes. 

I first picked up Redwall when I was in seventh grade.  I was looking for something to read, and my sister, who was a die-hard fan of the series and owned all of the books, suggest that I give it a try.  At the time, it seemed like a pretty daunting task, as I hadn't really read anything that long before, but to my surprise, I was hooked from the very first chapter.  Once I finished the first book, I spent the rest of the school year reading its sequel, Mattimeo, then plowed through Pearls of Lutra (my favorite of the ones I've read) over the summer.  In eighth grade, I read two more sequels, The Long Patrol and Marlfox, before going back in the chronology to its prequels, Martin the Warrior and Mossflower.  I got a third of the way through The Legend of Luke before my reading list was usurped by the required literature of high school English classes, and that's where I stopped.  I'm not really sure why I never picked it up again; I guess I was just so bogged down with classroom literature that I didn't want to spend any more time reading than I had to. 

But getting back to the point - the Redwall series has a special place in my memories of childhood reading.  There were so many aspects of the series that made it stand out with readers worldwide.  The very idea of combining animals with medieval life - two things that I'm sure appeal to almost every child at some point in their lives - was innovative unto itself, but there was so much more to the series that made the books so hard to put down.  There were a lot of memorable characters, from the heroes like warrior mice Matthias and Martin, to the comical hares and moles, to the dastardly villains like Cluny the Scourge and Slagar the Cruel - there's just way to many characters to for me to recount in this post.  There were the clever riddles that Jacques infused into the plot of every book, and songs that the characters sung - my sister and I would actually make up tunes to some of them and sing them out loud.  Even the language used by the characters was dynamic - many of the animal species, like the moles and the hares, had their own dialects.  And of course, who can forget Jacques' mouth-wateringly vivid descriptions of the food the characters ate?  I used to get pretty hungry reading about all the feasts that the characters had! 

Some critics have complained that later on in the series, the books became too formulaic, that the plot seemed to follow the same pattern over and over again.  I dunno - I haven't really read enough of the books to be in a position to judge that, but maybe that's why the series continued to sell - because sometimes, readers needed to come back to something clear-cut and predictable, and Jacques put enough creative effort into each subsequent book to still keep the concept of Redwall from going stale.  It's been almost twenty-five years - or in Redwall time, a hundred seasons - since the original Redwall was first published, but the fact that Jacques was able to continue writing the series even up to his death - the twenty-second book in the series, The Rogue Crew, is slated to come out this May - is a testament unto itself of his literary genius.  In any case, you can't deny the tremendous impact that Redwall had on children's literature, and Brian Jacques will most certainly be missed. 

B-)