Cry Yourself To Sleep - Softcover

This is another of Top Shelf's positively diminutive books, like Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me (2006) and Max Estes' Hello, Again (2005), that ring more resonantly than such slight things should. It relates typical youthful failures by roommates Andy and Jim (a rabbit) and their neighbor, the Robot. Jim loses his fast-food job because of fur on the sandwiches (food-handlers' gloves don't work for him since he doesn't have fingers; his nonrabbit father thinks his attitude got him fired). Andy gets the manuscript of his novel returned without comment (his friend Nate the bear thinks it would've been accepted if Andy had written in Nate's mom and her hot flashes). The Robot, fed up with being "a souless [ sic ] machine," tries to learn to live authentically from a tweeting bird, which comes to smash when Jim needs rescuing. All three are devastated, but they survive. Life goes on. A minimalist fable as charming as can be. Ray Olson
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