elaby | Book Journal: Triss - A Novel of Redwall

I never do book journals, because I'm a SLOW reader and I keep starting new books before I finish anything, but I finally finished this book, the 16th (I think) in Brian Jacques' Redwall series. Redwall was very formative in my early writing and online RP-ing experience.

Triss was the story of a young squirrel who lived most of her life as a slave, escaped with two friends, and made their way to Redwall, vowing to free the rest of the slaves.

This book was, as the Redwall books have gotten after the first four or five, incredibly formulaic. Strong main character who is destined to wield the Sword of Martin makes her way toward Redwall with colorful cast of woodlanders, abbeydwellers solve puzzles, everyone eats delicious food, and Dibbuns get into trouble. Songs are sung approximately every five pages. There are lots of very evil vermin, some funny, some menacing. Central characters die heroic deaths you could see coming at least 30 pages ahead.

The weird thing about this book was the pacing - it took Triss, the main character, 305 pages to get her party to the Abbeydwellers' party, and then in the remaining 80 pages, there were multiple battles, three separate villain groups were defeated, several characters died, the space they traversed in the first 300 pages was re-raversed, and the slaves were freed. Several characters settled down and started families. As I neared the end, I kept wondering if this was going to be a two-parter.

It was satisfying in that it was nostalgic and comfortable. The songs grated on me after a while, when I just wanted action and the plot to move instead of reading rhymes I felt for some reason unable to skip despite the fact that 98% had nothing to do with the story. There were some interesting things where vermin actually pointed out the difference between some of the "educated" woodlander dialect and their speech, which I'm not sure if Jacques has touched on before. Getting too much into that makes me feel too much like I'm in school (but these are SO easy that analyzing them would be like brain toe-touches).