Solitaire Book Club: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse

The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse by Charlie Mackesy. I have never understood folks who spend a lot of their time writing negative pieces about stuff from art or popular culture that they don't like. I mean, if you don't like it, just put it aside and move on to something else. With the exception of my exploration of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, these book reports (do you remember doing book reports?) have concerned books which I liked well enough to finish and so are generally pretty positive. I am going to break that streak here.

I got The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse because one of the blurbs on The Council of Animals referred to it. It is a short fable of a boy who keeps company with the three eponymous animals, but beyond that superficial structural resemblance there is little similarity between the two books. The Council of Animals was complex and sophisticated and it raised as many questions as it answered; The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse is naive, simplistic, and full of vapid observations and empty exhortations, about as deep as All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. If that's your thing, well, you do you, but for me it was all fluff and no substance.

It is almost a graphic novel with many wonderful gestural drawings in ink that were a pleasure to look at, which is why I finished the thing; if only one could ignore the words.