Chester retaliates by caricaturing the author (“Hi. Volleys of creativity and red ink follow: Watt introduces a fierce dog, only to have Chester make him vegetarian Chester begins a new story set in Chesterville (“where mice weren’t allowed”), but Watt makes it rain, washing his work away. Chester is determined to thwart Watt’s attempts to write a nice little book about a winsome country mouse using a red magic marker, he writes, “Then Mouse packed his bags and went on a trip very, very far away and we never saw him ever again!” underneath Watt’s opening sentence and attempts to make himself the star of the show. Here, the exasperated author-illustrator engages in a literary tug-of-war with the eponymous marmalade puss, who has a figure like Nero Wolfe and an outsize ego to match. This sidesplitting metafiction offers further proof of Watt’s (the Scaredy Squirrel books) extravagantly fresh, cheeky voice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |