Three cassettes, the description says, and three hours and five minutes of running time. The field directly above that sentence puts this audiobook at ten hours and forty-one minutes. Both numbers sit on the same product page, describing what is supposedly the same recording, and no reading of them makes them agree. The short figure arrives inside publisher copy that also promises a full cast; the long one is what the listing itself claims to be selling now. Before anything else here is worth discussing, a buyer needs to know that this page is describing two different objects and has been doing it since 2003.
Cluny the Scourage and Other Blurb Typos
Jacques published this in 1987, and the blurb underneath has aged into something close to an archaeological find. It calls the villain Cluny the Scourage, advertises hairbreath excapes, and reports that the book catipulted its author to international stardom. Those are the page's spellings, not mine. A blurb full of typos is not a verdict on a novel, but it does tell you how much attention this particular edition has received in the two decades since it was posted, and it sets a useful level of suspicion for everything else in the metadata. As it turns out, the metadata earns that suspicion.
The story under the typos is legible enough. Matthias is a young mouse at Redwall Abbey who has to get past his own fears and failures before he can protect anyone, Cluny is the rat outside the walls, and the supporting bench includes a stalwart badger called Constance, a hare named Basil Stag Hare, and an elderly wisemouse, Brother Methuselah. Kelli Smith's five-star response describes the shape better than the blurb does: two adventures braided together, one following Matthias toward the sword of the great warrior mouse Martin, the other following the abbey creatures as they defend what they love. The same reader volunteers a comparison to Robin Hood and praises the descriptions of food, which is a fair signal of what the prose spends its time on.
Book Two Is Secretly a Prequel
Matthias is the reason this works as a read-aloud rather than a solo listen. The description is specific about him: he must rise above his fears and failures, which means he does not begin capable, and a child following him has somewhere to go. Two of the five responses land on exactly that. One calls it an inspiring story of faithful friendship and bravery against overwhelming evils, with colorful, entertaining and unexpected characters. Another, from a reader signing as Dodey48, says you tend to forget that these are animals, not people. If you are weighing whether talking mice can hold an eight-year-old for a full evening, that second sentence is the one to weigh, and Russell's response says a child of exactly that age handed it five stars.
Nothing on the page explains where a listener goes next, but one reader leaves the most useful note in the column. Dodey48 reports being already halfway through the second book and adds, in a parenthesis, that it is a prequel. This listing files Redwall as number one in the Redwall series, so anyone who finishes here and reaches for the next thing by publication order may be walking backward through the chronology without being told. For a long children's series that is a real navigation problem, and the metadata does nothing about it. One line in a parenthesis is worth more to a parent planning six months of bedtimes than the entire blurb above it.
A Badge That Undercounts Its Own Five Grades
Ralph's four stars are the clearest warning on this page, and they have nothing to do with the story. The review reports that shipping was a day late, that the book arrived in its described condition, that the pages are pristine, and that the price suits people who enjoy having a physical book in their hands. Not one clause of it could have come from a listening session. It is a response to a parcel, filed under an audio product, and it is one of the grades feeding the number at the top. Whatever those four stars were rewarding, the novel was not it. Read the column as a pooled inheritance from every edition that has ever carried this name, because that is what it is.
Cluny and Basil aside, the badge itself does not survive contact with a calculator. Five whole-star grades are visible: four fives and a four. Those five average 4.8. The badge prints 4.7, a figure that five whole-star votes cannot produce under any rounding convention, so the number at the top is either counting something invisible or has drifted loose from the column below it. My advice is to ignore the decimal and read the five responses instead, four of which are about the book and all four of which are warm. The fifth, as noted, is about a delivery, which tells you how thin the base under that 4.7 really is.
Jacques Reads Alone Despite the Full Cast Line
Parents assembling a bedtime rotation are the obvious audience here, and the only age anyone in the column names is eight. The copy is honest about the register it wants: danger, laughter, tragedy, mystery, a touch of wonder, a truly despicable villain, and a hero to take to heart. One response calls it a wonderful clean story, which is the phrase parents screening for content usually want to see, and nobody below it disagrees. Adults who grew up on animal fantasy have a second reason to be here, because the credit lists Brian Jacques as reader as well as author, and the copy adds a full cast, so the performance is at least meant to be an event rather than a plain reading.
Skip it if you need a short listen, or if you need a specific one. The two runtimes on this page differ by more than seven hours, and only one of them can be true of the file you receive. Skip it too if you want a modern remastered production, because everything in this entry, from the cassette count to the transcription errors, points at a catalog record that has been sitting untouched for a very long time. And if the full cast in that first line is what you are paying for, note that the credit field names exactly one person. Check the runtime against the cassette line before you commit, and treat whichever number turns out to be wrong as a fair warning about the rest of the page.
Key Details
- Performance: Brian Jacques reads the book, and the copy adds a full cast that the credit field never names.
- What it covers: Coming of age, siege and defense, animal fantasy, found family.
- Feel: Warm, food-loving, cheerfully perilous.
- Our call: Worth a family evening, provided you establish which of the two runtimes on this page you are actually buying.
A Few Questions About Redwall
Does the runtime on this Redwall listing match the description?
No. The description opens with a cassette-era line reading three cassettes and three hours five minutes, while the duration field says ten hours and forty-one minutes. That is a gap of more than seven hours on a single page. Nothing here indicates which of the two figures describes the file a buyer would actually receive today.
Is the full cast promised in the description reflected in the audiobook credit?
The opening line of the description says read by the author and a full cast, yet the narrator field names only Brian Jacques. Both statements sit on the same page and neither is annotated. If a multi-voice production is your reason for buying, confirm what the file contains first, because this record does not settle the question.
Why does the star rating read 4.7 when four of the five reviews are five stars?
The visible grades are four fives and a four, which average 4.8. A 4.7 cannot be produced by five whole-star votes under any rounding rule, so the badge is not a summary of the column beneath it. Read the five responses directly, and note that one of them concerns shipping rather than the story.
Should I start the Redwall series with this audiobook?
The listing files it as number one, so publication order starts here. One reviewer mentions being halfway through a second book and calls that one a prequel, which means reading order and internal chronology part company somewhere in the series. The page offers no guidance at all, so plan your sequence rather than trusting the numbering.
