The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter Gordon Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, science fantasy, science fiction
Pages: 160
Published by Lanternfish Press on March 17, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she’s never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists’ descendants and their friendly helper robots.
But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It’s not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she’s seen before.
My Review:
What would fairy tales look like on a world that, once upon a time, was settled by human colony ships? Somehow, the idea of Aesop or B’rer Fox and B’rer Rabbit, or even the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, still being the stories that children get told to help them cope with the world or get life and morality lessons, doesn’t quite work. (Disney might make it, but imagining what that would look like would be a different book entirely!)
That Anny’s remote village is a farming village that reads like somewhere in fantasy land makes the story itself feel like fantasy. That little Anny’s best friends are the veritable army of mice made out of scraps and fluff that she keeps under her bed AND, more importantly, writes stories about in her head, just adds to that impression of fae and fantasy.
At least until her grandfather – and his helper robot, Oskar – move in. Not because of Oskar, as there are plenty of “billies” (short for habilibots) around the little village. They just don’t personally impinge on Anny’s childhood all that much.
But because of her grandfather. Grandfather who remembers the early days of the colony, and, more important for the story, the early days of the city that grew up around the colony ships and their landing site. His memories, as interpreted through Oskar, disturb the peace of the household even though they seem like, well, fairy tales. Or the product of the disordered mind of an old man who is losing it. Or both.
And that’s the point where the story takes a turn into the Twilight Zone. Literally if you squint a bit. Because the people from the city, now called Harbor, suddenly find the little village. And start making the kind of offers that people – at least young people in a small village dreaming of more – mostly don’t want to refuse.
A trip to the ‘big city’. A chance to see the world outside their tiny village. The hope of a new, bigger, better, brighter, life. Grandfather knows it’s all a lie, but no one wants to listen.
Except little Anny. When the people from Harbor come for her, she knows she’s in danger – even if she isn’t quite able to understand why or how. She can tell that their truth is not THE truth, and that she needs to find a way to escape. If she can.
And that’s when the mice, not just her mice, and not just the mouse she made with her grandfather’s whiskers, come to her rescue so that she has a chance to rescue her family. Even if Anny, with the help of the mice, has to destroy much of Harbor in the process.
Escape Rating B: At first, I had a bit of a time getting into this one. I think you kind of have to just go with it for a bit and let it grab you. Or you have to settle into Anny’s perspective and stop worrying about whether what she’s telling you is happening is REAL, just in her imagination, or actually a child’s interpretation of events that are above her head but all around her.
In that sense, it reminded me of One Level Down, as we’re also seeing that SFnal world from a child’s perspective, at least at first. That world is every bit as cruel in its way as Anny’s world is in hers, and Anny has to break herself out by reaching a perspective of a less child-like version of herself.
Anny’s world is just that bit less cruel because the terrible things that happen to her are caused by outside agencies, where the child in One Level Down is betrayed by her own family. So there’s a bit of a remove that helps the reader ease into things here.
The reader, on the outside looking in, knows that the situation in Harbor is not a damn thing like the people from Harbor present it to be. Anyone who has read even a bit of SF can easily determine the exact ways in which that situation is very, very wrong. And it does have a bit of a Twilight Zone feel in the way it’s currently going wrong.
But part of the SFnal element – and all of the fairy tale elements – are carried in the paws of the mice. Not just Anny’s mice, but the mice she finds at Harbor, hidden in the walls, powering the infrastructure and perfectly capable of setting that infrastructure on fire. Which they do, because Anny, in her own way, is one of them.
How Anny becomes one of them, whether her own mice or real or imaginary constructs or imaginary wrapping for something else real is never fully explained and doesn’t have to be. Because we’re Team Anny every step of the way, and if Anny needs to pretend to be Anny Mouse or become Anny Mouse or just be ANNYMOUSE (anonymous), that’s just fine with us as long as some version of Anny brings down Harbor and gets to take herself and her people HOME.
