This book is nothing if not charming. I picked it up in Kinokuniya, one of Singapore's last surviving large bookstores (somehow bookstores have not proliferated in the same way as malls. Somehow.) which still allows you to browse books. I opened it in the middle of a comic story about the author as a young boy, discovering that the "itch" inside his shoe that he had been worrying at all day was in fact a cockroach. It's a very short comic (in both senses) story, that perfectly captures a certain innocence and the intensity of the emotion of disgust when one is very young, along with its lingering effects.
Other stories in the book are more fantastical. A story about a man obsessed with obtaining a new "thingy" would be heavy-handed in its allegorical moralizing, but for the well-paced advancement of the story, and extremely appealing artwork. The author, who goes by "drewscape" for this book, sometimes veers into the banal (the first story's conclusion, in particular, I found particularly weak), but the drawings and quirky little ideas or semi-self-conscious observations (one of my favorites were a young narrator's asides on the merits of a pink water bottle for boys) more than make up for any lapses.
This book is not (yet!) available on Amazon, but is probably at various local Singapore bookstores, along with, of course, Kinokuniya. Here's the publisher's page.
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