By Kate DiCamillo
A tiny mouse with oversized ears falls in love with a human princess, and to save her he goes down alone into a dungeon of rats.
Despereaux is the runt of his mouse family, born with his eyes open and ears far too big for his head. He does the one thing a mouse is never supposed to do: he falls in love with a human princess, and he speaks to her, out loud. His own family is so horrified that they send him down to the castle dungeon to be eaten by the rats. But this is a mouse with the heart of a knight, so when a rat down in the dark hatches a plan to drag the princess underground, Despereaux is the one who goes after her, armed with a needle and a spool of thread.
There's a castle, a princess, a dungeon, and a knight, but nobody in this book has a spell or a magic sword. Despereaux saves the day with soup, a needle, a spool of thread, and plain nerve, and that's a good part of why it works. DiCamillo tells four stories at once — the mouse, a rat down in the dark, a beaten-down serving girl, and the princess — and slowly folds them into one, and following all four is part of the pull. The narrator talks straight to you the whole way, which keeps the darker turns from feeling too heavy to sit with. For a lot of children this is the first book on the trail with real emotional weight, and DiCamillo carries it about as well as anyone writing.