The Tale of Despereaux

Despereaux Tilling is born the runt of his litter in a castle, a mouse with oversized ears and, most unforgivably to the rest of mouse society, his eyes already open at birth. Rather than scurrying and fearing the humans the way a proper mouse should, Despereaux falls in love with human music and, worse, with Princess Pea herself, and when the mouse council catches him speaking to her he is sentenced to the dungeon and the rats that live there, a sentence meant to be a death sentence. In the dungeon Despereaux meets the jailer Gregory, who spares him through storytelling, while the narrative pulls back to explain how the rat Roscuro ended up in that same dungeon in the first place, after a childhood love of light led him into the castle's great hall and, through a chain of small disasters, into the queen's soup bowl at the exact moment she died of shock, a death the kingdom blamed on rats and answered by banning both rats and soup. Roscuro, humiliated and grieving his own exile from the light, wants revenge on Princess Pea, and he finds a willing accomplice in Miggery Sow, a servant girl sold by her own father and beaten half deaf, who has been promised she can become a princess herself if she helps kidnap Pea and bring her to the dungeon. Despereaux, armed only with a sewing needle strapped to him like a sword and a spool of red thread to find his way back out, descends into the dungeon to rescue the princess himself, and when Roscuro finally tastes the soup he has spent the whole book chasing, his hunger for revenge breaks, and the story ends with mice, rats, a princess, and a serving girl gathered at last around the same bowl.

DiCamillo tells the story in short chapters that speak directly to the reader, breaking the fourth wall to ask questions and issue warnings, and the tone stays light and funny even during genuinely dark turns, a father's cruelty, a mother's cowardice, real violence threatened against a mouse smaller than a thumb. It reads quickly and aloud well, a fairy tale built for a read aloud audience as much as a solitary one.