BOOK REVIEW
Book Title: The KING, the MICE, and the CHEESE
Creators: Nancy and Eric Gurney
The KING, the MICE, and the CHEESE, by Nancy and Eric Gurney is a book I read at least 40 years ago, and I’m just getting around to telling you about it now. It was absolutely in the top 10 favorites I would reread. It’s illustrated with fantastic cartooning, especially the mice. I absolutely love how expressive their faces are.
It’s a lighthearted tale of your usual self-important, rich white guy who has a series of problems he needs to solve. In typical fashion, he throws his weight around and until he can get someone else to satisfy his petty whims.
His subservient advisors go to outlandish lengths to please their tantrum-prone Mucky Muck. They begin to bring in everything from cats to elephants in order to try to solve the latest problem. Yet each new catastrophe is really nothing more than the growing happiness of these animals as they begins to relax and settle in to the new home they’ve found themselves in.
Each one is brought there for a specific reason, with never a moment’s thought given to its well being or happiness. He would use them only for what he needed, and after they’d outlived their usefulness to him he would quickly mark them as the next problem his kingdom must eradicate.
The book itself is of course, a work of fiction. Nothing more than childhood stories of the outlandish. I mean, could you imagine the leader of a country being so self-aggrandizing, and so hyper-focused on only his own comforts and whims, yet so blind to the suffering of everyone and everything he can’t use somehow? Thanks just crazy talk.
That’s whackier than a mouse eating a nice cheese dinner, with very good manners.
