Geraldine loves music. He never knew what it was until one day he heard a flute playing. He found a block of cheese and began carving it. Once he started carving, a musical mouse began to appear in his work. This mouse played all types of music and Geraldine was introduced to a new hobby that he loved.

Geraldine finds a huge piece of parmesan cheese that her friends help her bring to her hideout in the barn. As she eats the cheese, she notices that she is whittling a mouse playing the flute on its tail. That night the cheese mouse plays music for her, which Geralding has never heard before. When her friends get hungry, they ask her to eat the cheese. Geralding explains to them the importance of music, and plays her own tail. Then they eat the cheese. A good website for this book is: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/di...

This book is good for children who have a great imagination. It is about a mouse who finds a statue of a mouse playing the flute in a block of cheese. The music begins at dusk and goes until dawn. Geraldine's friends want some cheese and she says no because the cheese is music. They laugh at her until she can play the music through her tail and then because Geraldine now has the music, they can all eat the cheese.

Watch out for this book-if you read it with any type of in-depth thought or introspection, it gets more than a little weird. Lionni's story focuses on Geraldine, a mouse among mice who finds a large block of cheese that magically forms a musical mouse once Geraldine starts gnawing on the cheese. This cheese mouse plays music from her tail, but only at night, and only for Geraldine. When the other mice attempt to force Geraldine to eat this cheese mouse, Geraldine tells them that this musical mouse is too precious to eat and illustrates her point by playing music on her own tail. The mice agree that this gift must be preserved, but now that Geraldine can make music on her own the cheese mouse is no longer needed and they happily gorge themselves in a slightly-cannibalistic-esque scene of cheese mouse eating.
And typing all of that didn't make it make any more sense to me at all. I enjoyed Lionni's surprising genre reversal that revered the arts above even the mice's hungry bellies, but thought Lionni turned this concept on its head when Geraldine, the keeper of this great secret, then gave it no account at all once she could play music herself. I struggle with knowing Lionni's greater purpose for this piece, and look forward to reading this book to a group of kids to see what sense they make out of it-maybe I'm just too much of an adult to fully enjoy it. And how sad that is for me! ( )

Leo Lionni illustrated this book using color pencil sketches. It is a tale of a mouse who shares a block of cheese. As she share bits of the cheese she creates a sculpture of a musical mouse that magically plays music.

Lionni, like in a few of his other books, tells a story about the importance of the arts. In this case the arts that are emphasized are sculpture and music. ( )