In these posts I hope to share a little about what I am reading with my two children. Not exactly a review but a look at a book we’ve read together and how it worked for us. For context, my daughters are currently 7- and 10-years old. They are both excellent independent readers but we choose to continue our family habit of reading a chapter together before bedtime.
If this were a proper book review, I would share my personal perspective on The Tale of Despereaux and what worked or didn’t work for me. I have no trouble coming up with my own opinions about this book and thinking of how I might share them.
But this is supposed to be something a little different. A look at something I read and shared with my two kids. How it worked for us as a family and how we experienced it together. For context, we read it on and off over the summer so it likely suffered a little because we weren’t consistently reading it every night. When we did read it together, the girls always asked for me to read another chapter. (The chapters are very short so we could easily read 3 per night. I like this for read aloud because I’d prefer to acquiesce to the request for “one more chapter” rather than have to stop in the middle of a long chapter.
When we choose a chapter book for our family evening time, I typically offer up a few suggestions and then the girls pick. My suggestions are not always books I’ve read before, such as this one. We have read Kate DiCamillo together before though so had some idea of what to expect. (See my review of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane)
Can you tell I’m avoiding getting to the point? I think DiCamillo is a talented and thoughtful writer. This is the second book of hers I’ve read aloud to my children and thought, should I not have done that?
The Tale of Despereaux is the story of a very small mouse with very big ears, a rat who has been rejected by the light, and an unloved servant girl. It’s a fairy tale, a story that leans on the tropes of romantic storytelling – heroes and princesses and deep dark dungeon. It’s also a deeply sad story. Not because it has a sad ending but because the characters truly suffer along the way and this is an unusual trait in children’s stories. The servant girl isn’t just abandoned, she’s sold and abused and damaged in a way that, even at the end, cannot be fixed. The rat isn’t just a villainous rat, he’s a villain who has become so because he has been rejected and hurt by the world.
Some of this was, I think, over my kids’ heads but I wonder too how much sinks in and what they think of it all. When they ask questions of the world – be it lockdowns during Covid-19 or why they have a new classmate from Ukraine – we have always tried to be honest but gentle. They really haven’t experienced or witnessed much darkness yet and I’m very, very thankful for that. I wonder if, for a child who maybe had experienced the things we’ve tried to shelter ours from, this book would be read differently. Would they understand the hope that DiCamillo is conveying here?
As I think this book over, I think about the ambiguity that DiCamillo gives her characters and perhaps this is what’s so unusual about her writing. Ambiguous characters are, of course, common in literature, but not widely so in books meant for children. These characters are angry and they choose. These characters long for beautiful moments and they commit wrong. Despereaux is small and wounded but chooses to be brave. There’s a really beautiful scene where he has to choose to forgive another character.
I guess I would say, proceed with caution. DiCamillo is absolutely worth reading but know what you’re getting yourself into! And for children dealing with hard moments in their real lives, fiction like this could be a real lifeline.
Karissa Reads Books 
This is such a thoughtful way to engage with this book – I love that you wonder about what, if any, of the dark and difficult stuff your girls absorbed and understood, and what they made of it. When you read out loud, do you discuss what you’ve read? It occurred to me that you could actually ask them; they might have interesting or even unexpected answers.
Thank you! Have you read Di Camillo before?
It can be a fine line between addressing hard subjects that kids are aware of and inadvertently bringing up concepts they have not yet thought of. When I read aloud I don’t stop and expand on things in the story but they can stop me and ask questions and they often will. Or it will come up in conversation the next day, so I can tell they’ve been thinking about it. Di Camillo plays with a lot of fairy tale tropes in this book and so we talked quite a bit about how the story varied from what we expected. I think there were elements in the story that they thought were sad but didn’t connect to being a real life issue – like a little girl who gets sold off by her father and then consistently abused. They don’t (thankfully) have a real life context for that whereas my husband and I found it much harder to read.
Yeah, I think sometimes we forget as adults that kids tend to take what they can use and let the rest go, at least until they’re older. I remember reading Julie of the Wolves as a kid and adoring it – in retrospect, there’s a scene where she’s quite clearly assaulted as a child bride, and I knew I didn’t like that scene, but I moved past it quickly and focused on the bits I did like that had wolves in them.
Exactly. Likely someone insisting on sitting down and discussing that scene with you would have been more upsetting than simply reading it and moving on. It can be a tricky balance though.
I remember feeling similarly to this author’s novel Because of Winn Dixie. Then again, it was my niece who recommended it to me. She is … I want to say 9? I remember feeling troubled by the novel The Great Gilly Hopkins when I was in 3rd grade, but really, that feeling turned into a desire for justice and fairness.
That’s a good reminder that sometimes books like this are a way for kids to become aware of the the need for justice and fairness. I definitely read books for kids when I was a kid that also left me feeling troubled and slightly confused about the world.