The Tale of Despereaux

The Tale of Despereaux is a children's fantasy novel by Kate DiCamillo, published in 2003. It is told as a story in four parts, and it gathers four characters whose separate stories converge: a mouse of unusual talents, the princess he loves, a servant girl who longs to be a princess, and a rat determined to bring them all down.

Despereaux Tilling does not behave like the other mice. He was born with his eyes open, he reads rather than gnaws, and he listens to music, and his affection for the human princess is a crime under the rules of the mouse community. The sentence of the dungeon places him where Roscuro, a rat with his own grievance against the royal household, is already at work.

DiCamillo writes directly to the reader, addressing them in the second person at intervals, and she uses the vocabulary of a fairy tale while keeping her characters' failures in view. The book won the Newbery Medal in 2004 and was later adapted into a film, a video game and a stage musical.