Petersen never veers into melodrama, maintaining a near-perfect balance of detail and restraint, rarely going beyond the dialogue or explication needed to move the story along. Withholding further details lets the reader’s mind wander through this world, creating a richer experience of the story by giving us the power to expand it according to our own imagination. As in the original Star Wars trilogy (whose Jedi were obviously a model for the Guard), the larger back-story is alluded to, but only a few, spare details are given to illustrate the story we’re reading. Here, we learn bits of information about the matriarchal structure of the Guard (an aspect of the story, unfortunately, never fully explored), and a war with the weasels from a few years before. In addition to the aforementioned map, Mouse Guard has a rich mythology of its own, alluded to in the prose preambles at the beginning of each chapter.

Storytellers in every medium use these tools: Petersen uses them with precision. By juxtaposing the characters’ physical size and the size of their struggle, the reader is further invested in the story and the metaphor is strengthened. Petersen’s mice are no different from Tolkien’s hobbits or even the Biblical David: these characters struggle against forces both literally and figuratively bigger than themselves. It’s a basic, mythic story that’s at once fresh and familiar. Celanawe, an aged mouse who claims to be a hero from the Guard’s past, joins them in the fight to protect Lockhaven. The three protagonists, sent out to search for a missing grain merchant, uncover a plot to overthrow Lockhaven, the central city of the mouse territories, by a separatist militia known as the Ax. Predators from outside the mice-controlled territories - snakes, weasels and crabs - lurk through the pages of Mouse Guard, but the real threat comes from within. The book centers on three mice - Lieam, Saxon and Kenzie - that, as members of the Guard, function as “escorts, pathfinders, weather watchers, scouts and body guards for the mice who live among the territories.”

The story is epic, the characters larger-than-life, but the scope is scaled down, literally, to the size of mice. Casual and devoted readers are left sifting through a glut of trilogies and “cycles” in the form of books like doorstops, each accompanied by a map of some imaginary world.ĭavid Petersen’s debut, Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, has a map, but its similarities to the cartographic-fetishists of fantasy end there. It’s the same in any medium: it’s hard to find the true talents amidst the countless pretenders to the throne, resulting in stagnation instead of innovation. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the standard-bearer in the realm of fantasy fiction, so it’s no surprise that many authors working in the genre try to imitate the laboriously detailed world of Middle Earth.

Mouse guard by david petersen