The Tale of Despereaux
by Kate DiCamillo
PLOT SYNOPSIS (from the book)
This is the story of Despereaux Tilling, a mouse in love with music, stories, and a princess named Pea. It is also the story of a rat called Roscuro, who lives in darkness but covets a world filled with light. And it is the story of Miggery Sow, a slow-witted serving girl with a simple, impossible wish. These characters are about to embark on a journey that will lead them down into a horrible dungeon, up into a glittering castle, and ultimately into each other’s lives. And what happens then? Reader, it is your destiny to find out.
Series: Single Book
Age Recommendation: 10+
Content Notice: Brief violence, scenes of abuse, and disturbing imagery
Faith Based: No
ISBN: 978-0439701662
Overall
Characters
Story/Plot
Writing
Setting
Consistency
THE BOTTOM LINE
A good children’s book ruined by annoying tropes, incongruous themes, and a contradictory world.
THOUGHTS…
The Tale of Despereaux should be a whimsical story of cute animals, bravery, and imagination perfect for children. Despereaux seems unable to strike this chord and instead gets weird and disjointed very quickly.
The writing itself is mostly solid but for two things which are unforgivably annoying. First is what I call the “Dear reader” trope where comments like “And then, reader…” or “But, reader, he did look,” litter the story. I imagine this is supposed to feel more personal, as though the author is actually telling the story, and while it can work in select circumstances, I find it usually ruins immersion in the story. While “Dear reader” comments tend to come across as condescending, this problem is made even worse here by the forced inclusion of big words. To be clear, I favor large vocabularies, and the inclusion of uncommon words is not necessarily bad, but to use one and then address the reader directly to bring attention to the word, telling them to look it up in a dictionary (because clearly they are too young to know what it means) smacks of the condescension I so hate.
The characters in this novel are flat, sticking with their assigned personalities without any development. Despereaux is the exception, though only mildly so. Worse, one particular character begins as a stereotypical bad guy, goes through a minor arc only to end up back where he started for no logical reason except that he is the species the author decided were the villains.
The plot is even worse, spending most of its time catching back up to itself. The story is split between three main characters, each of them getting a separate portion, while the fourth section unites them all and resolves the story. The first part sets the story in motion with a focus on Despereaux while parts two and three provide backstory on two other characters. Backstory can be beneficial, but the execution and length of these sections brought the book’s momentum to a grinding halt, so much so that when the final section of the book begins, it cannot build enough momentum to carry the climax.
The world of this book is generic at best and is also beset with myriad inconsistencies which degrade the believability of the story’s setting. For example, it takes place in a kingdom where slavery is illegal, but the king has a dungeon with no light where people are sent to die. And the king is supposed to be one of the good guys. There are several other inconsistencies I cannot reference because this is a spoiler free review. Suffice it to say, the world and characters generally do not make much sense which absolutely demolishes the coherence of the story.
More than anything else, what ruins this book is the weird thematic elements. The big one is that a mouse falls in love with a human. There is the typical argument that love at first sight is unrealistic and should not be normalized, but beyond this, the very idea is pretty disturbing considering the target age demographic. Albeit nothing comes of this love because “Even in a world as strange as this one, a mouse and a princess cannot marry,” but even entertaining the concept in this roundabout way is a little creepy. And considering this story could easily have happened with the mouse and princess simply being friends, it makes me wonder what message this theme is supposed to be sending.
Despereaux should have been a fun, whimsical book but a plethora of small and large problems force me to conclude it is not worth reading, especially for the target age range.
RANTS AND RAMBLES
- DISCLAIMER: When I review books, weaknesses and inconsistencies tend to dominate my discussion; therefore, I will emphasize that any particular rant (and, yes, they can be long-winded) does not have special bearing on my unified opinion of the book. For this, please refer to my overall star rating. Additionally, this review is my personal opinion, intended to help like-minded readers navigate the plethora of available options. Use it as a tool but do not assign undue importance to it (i.e. feel free to disagree with me).
- The quality of the physical book that I read was very good. Solid cover, heavy-weight pages, attractive cover, spine and back, and nice illustrations. It looks great on the shelf, and I wanted very much to like it so it could stay. Alas, we do not always get what we want.
- Again, reader, we must go backward, before we go forward. This one sentence sums up a lot that is wrong with the writing in this book. Not only do we have the horrible “dear reader” cliché, but it also shows the propensity of this story to constantly go backward to provide backstory or context to what is about to happen. It’s fine to do this every once in a while, but Despereaux employs this tool with such frequency that it destroys any momentum the story has had a chance to build. It feels like you, as the reader, are constantly waiting for the real story to begin. Not a great feeling to have while reading a book.
- The concept of Despereaux, a mouse, falling in love with a human is ridiculous and, at the very least, confusing. Nothing comes of it (for obvious reasons), but it does make you wonder what DiCamillo was going for with this addition. Any and all of the story’s plot would have been served just as well by a friendship, so why the romantic language? The princess never expresses such an attraction (because she’s not insane), but the mouse is quite smitten. What is the point? What message are young audiences supposed to glean from this? Unrequited love, maybe, but the rest of the story doesn’t bear out that possibility. Does Despereaux really need to be romantically attracted to Pea to be brave for her? Especially considering the target audience age, is this a message we want to send? Personally, I don’t think so.
- Slavery is outlawed yet the king has a dungeon with no light where prisoners are sent to die and be eaten by rats. These two concepts, one of personal autonomy and the other of human life having little value, are at odds. And before you argue how this could make sense if the king wanted to drive home that he owns everyone and can do whatever he likes with them so no one else is allowed to own slaves, consider two things. First, this is a children’s book, and since such nuance will likely fly over the heads of this target demographic and cause them to draw the wrong conclusions, it should be left out. Second, servants in the king’s castle are given a good life, even getting so much food as to get fat, which would seem to contradict the idea of the king being a cruel person. I know this critique is not unique to this book, but the idea of a good guy putting people in a dungeon to rot and die with seemingly no due process is hard to rectify, making it practically impossible to root for the good guys.
- Spoilers: Can we talk for a bit about the dungeon? How do the prisoners get fed? There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for this chore. Yes, the jailer has food brought to him, but this does not seem to be the case for the prisoners. Even if food was brought, how would it be delivered if the place is so confusing it is impossible to find your way? And if food cannot be delivered, how did Miggery Sow’s father survive so long? And let’s talk about the jailer. His life must suck. Who did he anger to end up here? Also, why are the ”rules” such that rats don’t chew on the jailer’s rope? In this kind of story, not everything needs to make sense, but for being such an important set piece, the dungeon has far too many unanswered questions.
- Spoilers: Why does the queen die from seeing a rat in her soup? Is she a delicate flower? Perhaps, after all, we know precious little about her. Would the average person die from seeing a rat in their soup? Faint, perhaps, but it seems unlikely that they would die. I don’t know if this was supposed to be funny, whimsical, or if it is just a ridiculous contrivance to move the plot forward, but it is too ludicrous for me to accept, even in this fantasy setting.
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