Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by bennysbooks
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
3 stars from me, 1 mill stars from my (nearly) 7-year old
The kid was totally enchanted by this book. His eyes filled with tears when he realized we had finished (there are pages of questions/previews at the end, so he thought we had more time), and he went to sleep with it beside his bed. He felt the magic of this story, that's certain.
I, in my hopelessly adult way, had qualms. There was a lot to love here: it was very fairytale-esque, dark and dramatic, with sweeping emotional pronouncements about light and dark, about the power of stories, about forgiveness. I know I would have loved it as a kid, too. But so much of it felt uncomfortably conservative to me. I don't know a lot about the author's life, but if I had to guess I would bet she holds some old-school religious values about good and evil. Not that everyone "bad" was irredeemably evil (Roscuro and Mig achieve some level of redemption by the end), but that the characters who were inherently good, incorruptible, were also inherently beautiful (Pea) or cute (Despereaux). And the ugly (Roscuro) or dumb (Mig) or poor (Mig's father) characters were easily corruptible and needed to be "saved" by the light of the beautiful ones.
There is a reading of Roscuro's arc where he had the propensity for good in him at the outset, but it was squashed by the way people (Pea) reacted to his ugliness. Even so, the text doesn't challenge the belief that you can ascertain someone's goodness from their appearance or station, it merely maintains that forgiveness is the only way to preserve your own light, and that your light may ease some of the darkness in others. So, in the end, that generous reading of Roscuro is nullified because his heart was "hardened" at the first real challenge to his pursuit of light and his own self-perception. He was destined to be evil after all.
I was particularly horrified by the treatment of Miggery Sow - the name(!), the way the author heaped trauma onto her, the fact that she was described as ugly (I can't remember if that word was actually used, but the descriptions, coupled with the artwork, conveyed enough), fat, and dumb. Characters like Mig are fine to include in your story, but the portrayal was abject and pitiable rather than compassionate. Though she was shown compassion in the end, it was meant to show the goodness of Pea, not the inherent worth of Miggery Sow. I think Mig deserved more. It had me reflecting on the portrayal of Thick in Hobbs' RotE; Thick is written as being a "half-wit", and has a similarly tragic backstory, a similar moment of corruptibility, but is written with love and agency so that he comes to feel like a real, valuable member of the cast of characters (rather than merely a tool depicting trauma or a foil for goodness, which is what Mig felt like by the end).
Anyway, I honestly don't know how to feel about this book now that we're done. I'm ecstatic that my kid is becoming an obsessive bookworm, and I'm not at all opposed to kids reading dark plots or encountering imperfect representation (especially when it leads to thoughtful discussion, which it did here - when I shared with him my feelings about Mig, he said he believed that she just wasn't on her "right path" yet, and we had a good little chat about what that meant). But I'm definitely curious to learn more about DiCamillo's worldview as we read through her works.
The kid was totally enchanted by this book. His eyes filled with tears when he realized we had finished (there are pages of questions/previews at the end, so he thought we had more time), and he went to sleep with it beside his bed. He felt the magic of this story, that's certain.
I, in my hopelessly adult way, had qualms. There was a lot to love here: it was very fairytale-esque, dark and dramatic, with sweeping emotional pronouncements about light and dark, about the power of stories, about forgiveness. I know I would have loved it as a kid, too. But so much of it felt uncomfortably conservative to me. I don't know a lot about the author's life, but if I had to guess I would bet she holds some old-school religious values about good and evil. Not that everyone "bad" was irredeemably evil (Roscuro and Mig achieve some level of redemption by the end), but that the characters who were inherently good, incorruptible, were also inherently beautiful (Pea) or cute (Despereaux). And the ugly (Roscuro) or dumb (Mig) or poor (Mig's father) characters were easily corruptible and needed to be "saved" by the light of the beautiful ones.
There is a reading of Roscuro's arc where he had the propensity for good in him at the outset, but it was squashed by the way people (Pea) reacted to his ugliness. Even so, the text doesn't challenge the belief that you can ascertain someone's goodness from their appearance or station, it merely maintains that forgiveness is the only way to preserve your own light, and that your light may ease some of the darkness in others. So, in the end, that generous reading of Roscuro is nullified because his heart was "hardened" at the first real challenge to his pursuit of light and his own self-perception. He was destined to be evil after all.
I was particularly horrified by the treatment of Miggery Sow - the name(!), the way the author heaped trauma onto her, the fact that she was described as ugly (I can't remember if that word was actually used, but the descriptions, coupled with the artwork, conveyed enough), fat, and dumb. Characters like Mig are fine to include in your story, but the portrayal was abject and pitiable rather than compassionate. Though she was shown compassion in the end, it was meant to show the goodness of Pea, not the inherent worth of Miggery Sow. I think Mig deserved more. It had me reflecting on the portrayal of Thick in Hobbs' RotE; Thick is written as being a "half-wit", and has a similarly tragic backstory, a similar moment of corruptibility, but is written with love and agency so that he comes to feel like a real, valuable member of the cast of characters (rather than merely a tool depicting trauma or a foil for goodness, which is what Mig felt like by the end).
Anyway, I honestly don't know how to feel about this book now that we're done. I'm ecstatic that my kid is becoming an obsessive bookworm, and I'm not at all opposed to kids reading dark plots or encountering imperfect representation (especially when it leads to thoughtful discussion, which it did here - when I shared with him my feelings about Mig, he said he believed that she just wasn't on her "right path" yet, and we had a good little chat about what that meant). But I'm definitely curious to learn more about DiCamillo's worldview as we read through her works.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Child abuse, Violence, Death of parent
Minor: Fatphobia, Grief, Classism