A scampering good time
Anny lives in a small village called Tsedt, and she doesn’t know anything about the world outside of it. The City is a myth; the Faraway is out there, supposedly. And there was a Before. But if it’s not here, is it real at all?
The only things that are real to Anny are those she can see, like her family, her village, and the little mice she makes out of stuffing that she keeps underneath her bed. She mostly keeps to herself, her mice, and her robot-friend Osker, but when visitors from the City come into Tsedt, her whole world opens up.
The visitors, a man with a plastic yellow face named Yello and a woman named Mizz Krizzy who repeats “So pretty!” and “So handsome!” constantly, aren’t coming only as visitors though. They’re here to retrieve certain suitable teens to bring them into the City with them, for unknown reasons. The villagers are either excited or scared, but they’re soon given reassurance in the form of happy letters from the departed village teens.
But are we really supposed to trust this?
Despite being younger than many of the other visitors—Anny is presumably under 10—she’s brought to the City herself, where she moves into a large building and given bland, colorful foods to eat and hooked up to machines that copy her memories. Distrusting of this whole new reality, Anny stops sleeping and refuses to give her memories away to these machines.
Soon, it’ll be up to her to discover what’s really going down in the building and what it is she has to do about it.
The Girl Who Made a Mouse from Her Grandfather’s Whiskers is a charming sci-fi novella with a lovable little lead. Anny is not only the protagonist of this story but the narrator, someone who doesn’t understand all the nuances of the present, past, and future. But she understands what it is that remains important. The people around her are real, and her friendships are real, even if they’re in the form of supposedly one-note robots and self-made mice. It’s what she loves that she fights for, and in the process, she fights for the whole world.
The Visitors are a lovely, subverted addition to the tale. While our reader-radar is blinking furiously the moment these strange people arrive in Tsedt, they don’t exactly intimidate us either. There’s something soft in Mizz Krizzy, something we can believe in even as she tells everyone they’re pretty time and time again. It’s not necessarily a story of her changing; it’s a story of us discovering the nuances within her.
The second half of the novella follows Anny as she transforms—perhaps physically, perhaps metaphorically—into a mouse herself. Is this a result of her lack of sleep and nutrients, or is she actually able to move around the building undetected? It’s a question we ask but are glad to ignore as author Kenneth Hunter Gordon takes us on a journey of survival and heroics. We don’t have to understand all of what Anny is capable of, so long as we surrender to the fairy tale storytelling. What we need to know will come through in the emotion, in the success, in the change.
This is a big-hearted novella told with warmth and whimsy. An easy recommendation for those readers on the hunt for unexpected heroes, purposeful prose, and endings we deserve.
What did you think?