The Rescuers Universe

Miss Bianca is a white mouse who lives in a Porcelain Pagoda, wears a silver chain, writes poetry and belongs, by profession, to the Prisoners' Aid Society — an order of mice pledged to comfort the captive. Bernard is a pantry mouse, brave without quite meaning to be, and devoted to her from the first page. Margery Sharp sent the two of them, with the Norwegian sailor-mouse Nils, to free a poet from the Black Castle in 1959, and then kept sending them out: to a Diamond Palace with a Duchess in it, to a salt mine, to the Orient, to the Antarctic ice. Nine novels, all Sharp's own, run from The Rescuers to Bernard Into Battle in 1978, with Garth Williams's drawings in the early volumes. Disney's 1977 film took its title and its two heroes from the first books and little else; the novels are drier, wittier and more dangerous than the cartoon, with a satirist's eye on committees, courtiers and the vanity of the brave. Read them in the order they were published — the first book is the best door, and each later one leans lightly on the last. They suit a reader of nine or ten who is ready for irony, and an adult who never noticed, first time round, how sharp Miss Bianca's tongue is.