“So beautiful I almost cried”

My 11 year old.

Delighful book. Sometimes I find a children's book that I like more than I would have 50 years ago, and this one is a prime example. ( )

"A cage would never do for one made to fly...", truer words have never been written! What a fantastic story about unforeseen friendship and bittersweet affection. The story is about a house-bound mouse who unexpectedly meets a caged dove. The mousewife is bored with her everyday routine caring for her mousehusband and has an appetite that cheese could never satisfy. She meets a dove who was captured and trapped. The dove's tales fill the mousewife with wonder and she is fascinated immediately. She learns about the world outside and aches for something more. Blue skies! Tall trees! Far horizons! I adored this story which offers a new perception on freedom, longing and love. Children and adults of all ages will embrace this story which can be read on many different levels and deem it a true classic. ( )

The Mousewife was written in 1967. It's a children's book, a fraction longer than a picture book, that took me eight minutes to read, but a good bit longer than that to think about.

I was startled by it, because I expected something from this period to be cute and cuddly and describe the happy mousewife piling up corn for her mousebabies, and probably worrying about a cat or a ferret or something. But I know Rumer Godden; I should have known to expect more than that.

Because that's not the plot. That is, the mousebabies and the food are there, but this mousewife longs for something more than her usual existence, where "there are so many children and crumbs and bits of fluff to think of." Her husband disapproves; he tells her, "I think about cheese. Why don't you think about cheese?" He bites her on the ear for venturing too far from the mouse hole, but she ventures all the same.

If I tell you any more, I'll have told you the whole plot - it is, after all, a picture book. It's a lovely little book, with a more ambitious, less cuddly, message than I expected.

A mousewife realizes that there is a world beyond her everyday experience. ( )