Little Mouse's big secret

Frankly, I found this book to be disappointing. The Little Mouse finds a fruit of some kind (perhaps a cherry, given its size relative to the protagonist) and buries it, whereby it becomes the titular secret. LM deflects inquiry after inquiry regarding the nature of what he's buried, and, after some time, the fruit grows into a tree. I thought I knew where the book was going, with the tree as a visual metaphor for Walter Scott's famous aphorism, “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!” That is, our secrets can take on lives of their own and balloon to an unmanageable size. The ending of the book came out of nowhere, as fruit falls from the tree and mouse's friends (and former inquisitors) consume it. The moral of the story appears to be that our secrets can bear fruits, and I take the whole thing to be a tacit endorsement of modern day mass surveillance, by which the keeping of one secret provides for the well-being of society on the whole. Not a good message for children. One star.