Newbery Medalist Richard Peck's (A Year Down Yonder) offers readers a mouse's eye–view into Queen Victoria's court with this entertaining novel set in the year 1897, during the run-up to the monarch's Diamond Jubilee.
Fleeing whiskered bullies Trevor and Fitzherbert at an elite academy, the mouse narrator finds himself in the midst of the royal children's riding lessons, and he causes Princess Ena of Battenberg to fall from her horse. Mouse Minor, as he's called at school, thus becomes a rodent on the run, taking refuge in horse stalls and other hideouts. Though his tail "fell naturally into the shape of a question mark," the true mystery that haunts Mouse Minor is his parentage. He believes that if he can just get to Queen Victoria, she will have his answer.
Peck exploits the era with passing Dickensian references (for example, the narrator says of his "ancient" headmaster, "For old Chiroptera, "history was always the worst of times, never the best of times"--a nod to A Tale of Two Cities). The mouse hero's many adventures (with a kindly cat, a horse named Pegasus and a fleet of bats, among others) finally lead him to the queen and a hilarious exchange, but not to the answer he expects ("[T]he name that matters is the name you make for yourself in a life of struggle and success!" she tells him). Peck keeps the pages turning with clever turns of phrase and a race to find out the solution to the mystery of the mouse in question. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness