Miss Bianca is a white mouse of great beauty and supreme
self-confidence, who, courtesy of her excellent young friend, the
ambassador's son, resides luxuriously in a porcelain pagoda painted with
violets, primroses, and lilies of the valley. Miss Bianca would seem to
be a pampered creature, and not, you would suppose, the mouse to
dispatch on an especially challenging and extraordinarily perilous
mission. However, it is precisely Miss Bianca that the Prisoners' Aid
Society picks for the job of rescuing a Norwegian poet imprisoned in the
legendarily dreadful Black Castle. Miss Bianca, after all, is a poet
too, and in any case she is due to travel any day now to Norway. There
Miss Bianca will be able to enlist one Nils, known to be the bravest
mouse in the land, in a desperate and daring endeavor that will take
them, along with their trusty companion Bernard, across turbulent seas
and over the paws and under the maws of cats into one of the darkest
places known to man or mouse. It will take everything they've got and a
good deal more to escape with their own lives, not to mention the poet.
Margery Sharp's classic tale of pluck, luck, and derring-do is amply and
beautifully illustrated by the great Garth Williams.