{"id":682,"date":"2006-01-26T12:10:57","date_gmt":"2006-01-26T17:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=682"},"modified":"2006-01-26T12:14:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-26T17:14:53","slug":"the-tale-of-despereaux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/01\/26\/the-tale-of-despereaux\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tale of Despereaux"},"content":{"rendered":"

2004 Newbery Medal Winner: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo<\/p>\n\nThe Plot<\/b>
\nA mouse who doesn’t behave like a mouse must be punished. And that is what happens to Despereaux Tilling, an undersized mouse who dares fall in love with a human princess, read story books and enjoy music. He finds himself cast into the dungeon, where he inadvertently ends up in a position to foil a plot against the princess’s life and prove that being unusual isn’t always such a bad thing.<\/p>\n

My thoughts<\/b>
\nAs I read this book, uppermost in my mind was the thought that if I’d read this when I was 7 or 8, it would have become a favorite. At that time, I was a huge fan of books starring animals and would read them over and over again. Unfortunately, Despereaux was published a little (20 years) too late to catch me at that age, and while I enjoyed the book very much, I do not think it will be a beloved favorite. (I have similar feelings about Brian Jacques’s Redwall series.)<\/p>\n

The book employs a style of narration which I generally do not like: the author pauses fairly often to insert comments to the reader. It’s a popular style, since it allows the author to comment on their own cleverness, but I am not a fan. I read a book to be immersed in the world created there, and constant reminders that I am reading the story do little but jar me out of that mindset. The Series of Unfortunate Events books also use this technique; I find it irritating there as well, but there the author has clearly inserted himself (well, his pretend self) into the whole saga as a character, so it grates slightly less.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, even with these annoying authorial intrusions, the story was a very quick, easy read. I breezed through the whole thing in less than 90 minutes all told. The tale moved along at a brisk pace, and I didn’t find any spots where it dragged or bogged down. The plot itself, while decidedly uncomplex, was fairly original.<\/p>\n

The lack of complexity and in-depth world building does leave me with the feeling that this book is just fluff. It was good, but it was also forgettable — DiCamillo has failed to engage me with this setting to the point where I’m interested in hearing more news from it. I’ve found that it’s really the world that grabs my attention and keeps me: the United Federation of Planets, Hogwarts, Pern, Barrayar, Narnia — if that setting isn’t there, if I don’t feel inspired to at least sketch out in my head what might have happened next, then I do have to consider the book a failure on some level. The Tale of Despereaux has an extremely minimally developed setting. We are told that France exists, which suggests the story takes place on Earth, and we know that we’re in a kingdom, but one not identifiable in any fashion, either by the names of the characters or chance remarks.\n<\/pracut>\n

In Short<\/b>
\n7.5\/10. Good for a quick read, but it’s so bare bones that the substance is lacking. If you’re a fan of Redwall, Mrs. Frisby or The Rescuers books, you’ll probably like it, though all of those series have more complex worlds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2004 Newbery Medal Winner: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo The Plot A mouse who doesn’t behave like a mouse must be punished. And that is what happens to Despereaux Tilling, an undersized mouse who dares fall in love with a human princess, read story books and enjoy music. He finds himself cast into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}