DiCamillo’s “The Tale of Despereaux”

“A terrific, bravura performance” (from the New York Times Book Review)

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread. By Kate DiCamillo. Illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering. 270 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press. $17.99. (Ages 8 to 12)

In Kate DiCamillo’s new novel, a rat, Roscuro, travels upstairs from the total darkness of a dungeon and encounters light. Addressing the reader, DiCamillo writes: ”Imagine, if you will, having spent the whole of your life in a dungeon. Imagine that late one spring day, you step out of the dark into a world of bright windows and polished floors, winking copper pots, shining suits of armor and tapestries sewn in gold.”

Here we might see DiCamillo’s own career, her ascent from full-time clerk in a store selling used books to author of a much-praised first novel for children, ”Because of Winn-Dixie,” which won a Newbery Honor Award and climbed the best-seller lists. Some might see kinship with G. I. Gurdjieff’s mystic parable about humans being captives in a prison but only a few recognizing this is so and, hearing rumors of another place, arranging an escape.

In any event, she sets the stage for a battle between the forces of Darkness and Light in ”The Tale of Despereaux,” and the book is a terrific, bravura performance.