There's no doubt that the nature illustrations and the society of mice make this book an exquisite literary treasure, but the old-fashioned attitudes of the story and the mice started to annoy me a bit. For instance, not only does it have the typical outdated feature of the female characters (in this case mice) always being in charge of cooking and doing domestic tasks for their husbands, but how the author wrote about children (or rather, the young mice characters) irritated me too.

One of the main mice families in the book, the Toadflax family, has four young mice - two boys and two girls. I feel they're portrayed very stereotypically as the two boys are very mischievous and boisterous, always teasing their sisters and getting banned from helping out with adult jobs because they cause too much trouble. Whereas the two girls are always well-behaved, and are mostly only mentioned if they're helping the adults or are victims of their brothers' antics. Also, with this being a book about an old-fashioned society, I feel like the young mice aren't seen as very important by the adults - like I said, they're only really mentioned if they're being naughty or helping the adults with their tasks. Any problems the young mice might have are seen as not very important and the idea that children are a bit of an inconvenience for the adults is relied upon too often.

This is all a bit odd since children are the target audience for this book, and kids generally like to read about other kid characters! When I was very little I watched the TV adaptations of these stories, and I do remember for the TV episodes, they rewrote the stories slightly to make the young mice a much bigger focus, and now I thoroughly understand why they did.

I think, from the sounds of the introduction, Jill Barklem created Brambly Hedge as more of fantasy world of her perfect society rather than always keeping her young audience in mind. This is further evidenced by the regular appearance of the character Basil, the mice who is in charge of the wine cellars and is very knowledgeable about alcohol, and is great at conversation and telling stories (but possibly only when he's had a drink). His existence in the stories always seemed a little weird to me. At worst you could say his character's inappropriate for a kids' book, and at best he's just a kind of pointless sidenote who isn't going to be very interesting to young readers.