Tale of Despereaux – another mouse story?!
Tale of Desperaux (by Kate DiCamillo) has gotten fantastic reviews, and when I heard the movie was coming out, I decided I should read it to my 7 yr old daughter and 5 yr old son before we saw the movie. We read it aloud, and for me, it didn’t live up to the hype. It was a cute story about a mouse who falls in love with a princess and has the opportunity to rescue her from a dreadful fate. The story is told in four separate “books” – the first from the perspective of the mouse, and the subsequent books are told from the perspective of other pivotal characters.
To me, it seemed a little confusing for young kids to follow, although both of my kids seemed to be keeping up pretty well with the plot, and they each made some good connections between different parts of the story.
Some great books are not really conducive to reading aloud, though, and I think that this is one of them. It was distracting to me that the author kept interjecting questions to the reader. Really great read alouds tend to be more plot-driven as opposed to being focused on character development, and I felt like Despereaux was a thoughtful book; there wasn’t much action.
In the end, we missed the movie because we weren’t finished with the book before the movie was gone from the theater. It is just as well, though, because I heard through the grapevine that the rats in the movie were monstrous, and that it was really too intense for young kids – I wouldn’t want the kids to be too scared, although I have to admit they’ve seen Spiderman, Indiana Jones, and many other completely inappropriate movies 
I polled the kids after we were finished – which book did you like best, Stuart Little or Tale of Despereaux? They both picked Stuart Little over Despereaux, although my daughter’s favorite so far has been Because of Winn Dixie, another Kate DiCamillo book. I’ll talk about that one next time.
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