The Newberry Award-winning Tale of Despereaux tells the story of a mouse who falls in love with a (human) princess and saves her from the hands (or rather, claws) of an evil, dungeon-dwelling rat. DiCamillo, (author of Newberry Award-winning Because of Winn Dixie), tells this fairytale with a quaint, “dear-reader” style narrative. Three of us recently read (or listened to) this story and compared notes on our reactions to it. We found our reviews were decidedly mixed.
The dominant reaction was that the book had its lovely moments, but it left us all somewhat disappointed. I found DiCamillo’s commands to go look the difficult words up in a dictionary and “dear-reader” comments at the end of each chapter rather patronizing. We all found the portrayal of the servant girl, Miggory Sow, who is badly beaten by every adult around her, quite disturbing. The rats in the story are also pretty nasty – they love to run about through the filth in the dungeon and torture prisoners there. One of our favorite characters got killed off abruptly for no apparent reason and I found the ending didn’t quite live up to the build-up it had been given.
On the positive side, the writing is quite well done. The characters are brilliantly written and very funny (on the audio book, the voices are marvelous), and you can’t help butlove Despereaux, the mouse who was “born with his eyes open.” There were also some wonderful messages in the book about love and forgiveness. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, throughout the abuse of Miggory, the “dear reader”-ing, and DiCamillo’s musings about courtly love, perfidy (that's one of the words she tells you to look up), and non-conformity: “Is this book really meant for kids?”
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