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The Mousewife (2000)

by Rumer Godden(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0333344847 (ISBN13: 9780333344842)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

review 1: "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 an... mored deem it a true classic.
review 2: I absolutely love the New York Review Children's Collection, which is in the process of reissuing out-of-print children's classics. "The Mousewife" is one of their reissues. First of all, Rumer Godden is just a wonderful author. (When I was a child, I was enthralled by her "Miss Happiness and Miss Flower".)"Mousewife" is a simple little story, but with sophisticated emotional undertones. The little mousewife is quite ordinary, except that she longs for something more, something even she cannot articulate. Her boorish mousehusband is clueless and quite lazy. You have to wonder if Ms. Godden, having been abandoned by her husband in India, with two small children to support, is making a statement about husbands....Quite by accident, the mousewife discovers a caged dove and befriends it. In some sense, her own feeling of being caged is reflected in the dove's situation. I won't spoil the ending by speaking further of the plot. This book, like the best children's books, can be read on many levels and enjoyed by different ages, which is, of course, why it is a classic. (The illustrations were done by William Pene du Bois and are classic in their own right.) less

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