Fox by Margaret Wild
My rating: 5/5 cats
i am glad i am the only one to have rated this book (although dana and greg read it with me on the subway yesterday, so i know they have been tainted, too). the description above is what is printed on the book, which is scary enough:
An injured magpie and a one-eyed dog live happily together in the forest, until a jealous fox arrives to teach them what it means to be alone.
but i think what they really wanted to write is “help o help this lady is threatening us and if we don’t publish her crazy-assed book she is going to remove the toes of our children—call the police!!” i used to work in publishing and even though it was an academic press, we would still get the occasional scrawled-in-crayon manuscripts that i had to read and ultimately reject, and i was afraid one of those authors would find me and stab me with a burnt sienna. i cant even imagine what this book looked like when it was submitted. the end product is a fantastically dark story that no child should have read to it unless you are conducting sleep-deprivation experiments. it is written in serial-killer scrawl, with the words all over the page at wonky angles, the drawings are hectic and scratchy and terrifying and of course i give it five stars cats because i absolutely loved it. but is clearly the work of a diseased mind. (i just noticed this is an australian book. i understand it now. this is the kind of children’s story nick cave was raised on. this book is exactly how to make a nick cave. and now i have come around—go read this to your kids; make more little dour nick caves for me)
p.s. it turns out there was a goodreads.com glitch—i was in no way the first person to rate this—now i feel like a fool.
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