The Cheese (review)

So the cheese is, as the song requires, standing alone, and the rat thinks that's a darned shame ("What's the point of a hunk of cheese being left out and lonesome when it can be enjoying the company of a perfectly fine rat like me?"). On the way to enjoy the cheese, the rat is joined by the cat, then the dog, then the farmer's child, then the farmer's wife, and finally the farmer, at which point the momentum is so great that the collective opts to have a party. Though the story gets somewhat confusing just at the end (the rat brags of his unexpected virtue in a way that suggests that he's nobly eschewing the cheese, rather than just, as the illustrations show, joining the party), this is otherwise an amusing riff on a nursery favorite that's heretofore largely escaped reexamination. Touches of characterization (the dog is a clueless bonehead) and amusing turns of phrase (the child is "completely unshushable") add comedy, and there's sly humor in the repeated consideration of the cheese's standing-alone status and everybody's initial tendency to blithely accept same ("The song says 'The cheese stands alone,' and that's that"). Johnson and Fancher add print and collage textures, tonally blended into their backgrounds, to dappled paints, while bristly hatching and caricatured lines (and a sporty taste in clothing) make the animals cleverly yet broadly comedic. Readers will particularly relish picking out the textual echoes and counterpoints in the words tucked into the art ("Dell rules! Farmer farmer party!" in the antepenultimate spread) as well as following the sly and antiheroic rat. The text of the song is appended in case of mnemonic emergency, and since there's plenty there to question beyond the cheese's final stance, this might be an entertaining invitation for youngsters to interrogate the old chestnut on their own.