The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers
Kenneth Hunter Gordon
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN: 978-1941360958
Lanternfish Press, March 17, 2026, 160 pgs

Anny lives in a peaceful village with her family and their robot servant, Osker. The village isn’t wealthy, and everyone but the baby works hard, but it’s still a happy life for an imaginative little girl. For fun, she makes mice out of household trash and miscellaneous fluff, including her beloved grandfather’s whisker clippings. Everything is fine until visitors come from the city, a mysterious, half-ruined place made of the discarded space vessels that brought their ancestors from the Faraway. City people are a rare sight in rural villages like Anny’s, but these visitors are particularly impressed by the young people in the countryside and return regularly, inviting a few children away each time for special treatment. When it’s Anny’s turn, she discovers some unpleasant truths about the city dwellers and their plans for the future. Her mice, and the imaginative power they hold, become the key to her and her family’s freedom.

The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers is an odd little novella, but I mean that in the best possible way. While reading, I kept thinking of the Pied Piper, L. Frank Baum’s TikTok of Oz, and the 2012 magical realism film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Though it’s SF, there’s a mystical quality here that transcends strict genre conventions. The story is really more of a fairy tale, despite the space references and the setting in a long-matured planetary colony. This is not a book for those who like their spec-fic to be logical and crisp, or who want everything to connect sensibly and obviously. This is a deeply emotional experience in an immaculate lab coat. Parts of this book are very abstract, and readers will need to have their imaginations turned on to keep up with Anny’s journey, especially the more introspective parts.

There’s just as much invention as introspection on display here, though. Every household and organization on Anny’s planet has a robot or two, inherited from their spacefaring ancestors. Some of the robotic commentary is amusingly self-aware and sometimes carries hints of wisdom to keep genre-savvy readers on the right track when things get a little far out. There’s also a fair bit of whimsy—the main character keeps a collection of pretend mice to play with, after all, and the imagination they unlock is an important part of the story. That whimsy has a dark side, though. The author does an excellent job of luring us into eerie territory using cute moments as bait, and at times I was genuinely uncomfortable.

The prose is laconic and straightforward, without being too simple, expressing Anny’s childish perspective perfectly. She’s a thoughtful, introverted kid, and this comes across perfectly without becoming precocious. It also helps to keep some of the more disturbing elements of the story in the realm of myth rather than horror. Even so, there is a profound sadness underlying the foundations of this story, and I feel as though the plot is trying to build some hope out of its ashes. Whether or not it does, in the end, depends on the reader.