Corwin, Tom: Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim

Doubleday © 2008, 112 pages

Tom Corwin's Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim is the quickest of reads, a hundred odd pages, half of them full-page illustrations, the other half light on text. It's a sort of fable. The eponymous Mr. Fooster goes for a series of walks in what feels like a dream. Strange things happen to him that don't quite make sense, in the way of dreams. He befriends a giant bug, for example, and blows a big bubble that turns into a drivable car. Along the way he ponders questions like Why is yawning contagious? and How come you never see baby pigeons? The moral of the story is banal: basically, one shouldn't lose one's open-mindedness or sense of wonder lest one become rigid and miss out on life's bounty. Unless I'm missing something. Perhaps I'm just too old and embittered to appreciate the book. Probably in final form (I read an advance copy) it will be a pretty book: you can see the quality of the illustrations and hear selections of the text at the book's accompanying web site. But while the short text is trying to be meaningful, to me it seems not deep, but merely precious.

Tags: book reviews, books, Mr. Fooster, Tom Corwin