Despereaux (Spanish Edition)

Gracias

Our continuing education class is reading this in Spanish. The characters (mostly mice and rats) are well developed and hilarious. Despereaux has a serious identity problem. The book provides lots of new vocabulary and expressions for our wider exposure to Spanish in use without being a grind. The story would be charming in any language. It well deserves its Newberry medal.

This is a cute story for kids, yet kept my interest as a 54 yr old learning Spanish. I would call the level an intermediate with simple thoughts and grammer structure, but challenging enough to help me improve my vocabulary and Spanish comprehension. I'd welcome more books by this writer at this level.

What I expected and of good quality.

Wonderful book and excellent company to work with.

Excellent story!

Great book, read in Spanish, loved it. Like many fairy tales it has good and evil, tough trials and troubles, and a good ending. I look forward to reading this to my kids in Spanish.

As other reviewers have summarized, this "children's book" contains very dark themes of child abuse, cannibalism, sadism, humiliation, and manipulation. Certainly these topics that have been included in historical fairy tale stories, but Kate DiCamillo's narrative is so nauseatingly graphic that it reads more like a script from Criminal Minds or Silence of the Lambs. It fact, this story introduces a sadistic philosophy that delights, in almost sexual undertones, in violence and humiliation. The following experts could have easily come from Hannibal Lecter:"The meaning of life is suffering, specifically the suffering of others...Reducing a prisoner to weeping and wailing and begging is a delightful way to invest your existence with meaning.""This is how to torture a prisoner: first, you must convince him that you are a friend. Listen to him. Encourage him to confess his sins...You gain his trust, you refuse him...and [induce] physical terror along with the emotional sort.""I would like very much to torture a prisoner. I would like to make someone suffer.""Listen, this is what you do: Go and torture the prisoner...it will satisfy your cravings..."Attempts to redeem the story with so called forgiveness and "light" are overcome by the pervasive darkness of the narrative. By the way, the movie sanitizes these themes but is largely boring and poorly constructed.

This book was not in English and therefore useless for us. Not clear on advertising.

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