made by eugene huo on Mar 10, 2009

The Tale of Despereaux

For my oldest's birthday (she's now 6) we got her The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread, with the condition that we read it to her and she wasn't allowed to read it herself.

(Yes, she can read, and she can read way above her grade level.)

We put that condition on it because we had heard that some parts of the story were quite dark, and we didn't want her reading it without some company. :) The last thing we need is nightmares about rats and dungeons.

As a whole we liked the book, it was well written and has a nice pacing, well suited to reading aloud. It is a bit frightening in some parts, and I wouldn't read it to a two year old, but it does explore a lot of emotional territory, love, hope, cruelty, injustice, revenge, separation. There are a lot of words we had to explain the meaning of (and some I had to look up, even, like "perfidy"!). You will have to decide when it's appropriate for your child. Meanwhile, I would recommend picking it up and reading it yourself first! :) It's good.